Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

At the height of controversy surrounding the Litvinenko affair, former dissident and adviser to President Putin, Gleb Pavlosky, accused David Miliband of imbibing anti Russian sentiment ‘with his mother’s milk’ . He was indulging, undoubtedly, in a degree of hyperbole, and mining Miliband family history to impugn the current generation was an unfortunate mode of debate. However his comments reflected genuine anger at the British foreign secretary’s consistently hostile attitude to Russia and little has occurred, in the intervening two years, to reassure Russians as to Miliband’s good faith. Nevertheless, this weekend, Miliband will embark upon the first visit to Russia by a UK foreign secretary in five years, when he visits his counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in Moscow. Notwithstanding his clumsy, carping, unnuanced interventions on behalf of Ukraine and Georgia, there is an appetite for partnership between the UK and Russia. RIA Novosti, the state news agency, reports Russian hopes t...

The press have picked up on Andrei Lugovoi’s intended attendance at an event in Moscow tonight, at which a lot of British people will also be present. Lugovoi has garnered substantial publicity thanks to allegations that he murdered ex-KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko. These have propelled him into the Russian Duma where he represents Zhirinovsky’s extreme nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (not as the Guardian claims, a pro-Kremlin party, but rather a party in opposition to Putin’s United Russia). It is perhaps a timely moment to remember that theories about Lugovoi murdering Litvinenko, whether under instructions directly from Putin, or directed instead by a renegade group of ‘siloviki’, are merely that – theories – and that a growing body of evidence is being adduced to suggest that Britain’s case against Lugovoi is a weak one and that other possibilities are equally plausible. Mary Dejevsky has provided a useful synthesis of these arguments in the Independent (many of which draw...

Whilst Western relations with Moscow deteriorate, and David Milliband expels Russian diplomats from London, it is puzzling that newspaper in the west have missed a report about a criminal being harboured by the British government. There doesn't seem to be any realisation that Putin's regime might be entitled to see an element of equivalence between the desired extradition of Alexander Luguvoi and that of a self-confessed plotter of violent insurrection, wanted for serious financial crimes not only in Russia but now also in Brazil.