on the Salisbury attack European Council, 22 March 2018. In what the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson called the "extraordinary international response" on the part of the UK's allies, on 26 and 27 March 2018 there followed a concerted action by the U.S., most of the EU member states, Albania, Australia, Canada, Macedonia, Moldova, and Norway, as well as NATO to expel a total of over 140 Russian accredited diplomats (including those expelled by the UK).Putin's missteps over the Russian spy murder CNN, 27 March 2018. Additionally, in July 2018, the COBR committee were assembled following a poisoning of two other British citizens in the town of Amesbury, not far from Salisbury, the location of the Skripals' poisoning. It was later confirmed by Porton Down that the substance was a Novichok agent. Sajid Javid, the United Kingdom's home secretary insisted in the house of commons that he was letting the investigation teams conduct a full investigation into what had happened before jumping to a major conclusion. He then re-iterated the initial question to Russia regarding the Novichok agent, accusing them of using the United Kingdom as a 'dumping ground' In his speech at the RUSI Land Warfare Conference in June 2018, the Chief of the General Staff Mark Carleton-Smith said that British troops should be prepared to "fight and win" against the "imminent" threat of hostile Russia. Carleton-Smith said: "The misplaced perception that there is no imminent or existential threat to the UK - and that even if there was it could only arise at long notice - is wrong, along with a flawed belief that conventional hardware and mass are irrelevant in countering Russian subversion...". In a November 2018 interview with the Daily Telegraph, Carleton-Smith said that "Russia today indisputably represents a far greater threat to our national security than Islamic extremist threats such as al-Qaeda and ISIL. ... We cannot be complacent about the threat Russia poses or leave it uncontested." Conservative Party leader Boris Johnson's victory in the 2019 United Kingdom general election received a mixed response from Russia. Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov questioned "how appropriate ... hopes are in the case of the Conservatives" of good relations following the election. However, Putin praised Johnson, stating that "he felt the mood of British society better than his opponents". 2020s In March 2020, the British government declared Russia the most "acute" threat to UK security in the Integrated Review,