Throwing Brexit to the wind - how the EU rallied around Britain over Russia

Police officers stand by police tape as inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) arrive to begin work at the scene of the nerve agent attack on former Russian agent Sergei Skripal, in Salisbury, Britain March 21, 2018. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Three days after European Union leaders left a summit in Brussels with a discreet yet vague agreement to expel Russian diplomats over a nerve agent attack on British soil, envoys met back to share details before an afternoon deadline.

Unveiling national expulsion lists at a closed-door meeting on Monday, the 28 ambassadors from the EU's member states were unaware of the scale of their plan to isolate Moscow: more than half the bloc's governments had joined the West's most sweeping expulsion of Russian diplomats since the Cold War.