Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

On Sublime Oblivion Anatoly Karlin notes that the disgraced former mayor of Moscow , Yuri Luzhkov, has been granted permission to enter Britain.  Contrary to some reports though, he has not yet received a residence permit for the UK. Austria and Latvia have already rejected Luzhkov’s requests to live within their borders.  His family are currently in Britain and his daughters are studying at a university in London. All sorts of Russian dissidents, out of favour oligarchs and even terrorists have chosen to make these shores their home, over the past ten years.  Boris Berezovsky, the exiled tycoon who aspires to overthrow Russia’s government by force, and the Chechen rebel Akhmed Zakayev are two of the more prominent examples. In a recent Conservative Home article , Carl Thomson revealed that 150 extradition requests by Moscow had been rejected by the UK since 2001.  Partly the statistic is explained by links, cultural and economic, which exist between the Russi...

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.