British government expels 4 Russian diplomats
LONDON: Britain's relations with Russia deteriorated further Monday when the government announced that it would expel four Russian diplomats in retaliation for Moscow's refusal to extradite the key suspect in the poisoning death in London of a former KGB officer, Alexander Litvinenko.
Announcing the decision in the House of Commons, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, also said that Britain was suspending talks aimed at making it easier for Russians to get visas to Britain and would review "the extent of our cooperation with Russia on a range of issues."
In response, a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry said that London's "provocative actions" would produce "the most serious consequences for Russian-British relations as a whole," The Associated Press reported.
The spokesman, Mikhail Kamynin, said that the expulsions were "a well-staged action to politicize the Litvinenko case" and pointed out that the government of Britain had refused to extradite two prominent opponents of the Kremlin who live there: a businessman, Boris Berezovsky, and Akhmed Zakayev, the exiled Chechen leader.
Although both sides expelled diplomats in 1996 on accusations of spying, the latest turn of events seemed far more serious, experts in Russia's relationship with the West said Monday.
"The Russians will almost certainly respond, so there will be a tit for tat, and relations which are already poor will get even poorer," said Margot Light, professor emeritus of international relations at the London School of Economics. "It will take a long time to recover."
Russia has refused to send the suspect, Andrei Lugovoi, to Britain to face trial. It says that its Constitution forbids the extradition of its citizens to foreign soil.
But Britain's director of public prosecutions maintained that prosecutors have enough evidence to prove that Lugovoi administered a fatal dose of polonium 210 to Litvinenko in a pot of tea in a London hotel last November.
As he lay on his deathbed, Litvinenko, a fugitive from Russia who had obtained British citizenship, accused the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, of being behind his murder.
He died on Nov. 23, three weeks after he was poisoned.
Miliband said that Britain wanted to "bring home to the Russian government the consequences of their failure to cooperate" with the extradition request.
Moscow, he said, had "failed to register either how seriously we treat this case, or the seriousness of the issues involved, despite lobbying at the highest level and clear explanations of our need for a satisfactory response."
Lugovoi has maintained his innocence and has accused the British intelligence services of trying to recruit him to collect incriminating evidence against Putin.
On Monday, he said on Russian TV that the British moves showed "the results of this investigation were predictable from the very beginning and have always had a political character," The Associated Press reported.
The Foreign Office would not specify which diplomats would be sent home, only that they worked at the Russian Embassy here.
"A U.K. citizen has suffered a horrifying and lingering death," Miliband said. "His murder put hundreds of others, residents and visitors, at risk of radiation contamination. And the U.K. government has a wider duty to ensure the safety of the large Russian community living in the U.K."
The move by London was the latest sign of the growing tension between Russia and Britain - and more broadly, between Russia and the West and in particular, Europe - over issues like energy, Iran and missile defense.
On Saturday, Russia announced that it would suspend its obligations under the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty in response to American proposals to build two missile defense bases in Eastern Europe.
Other issues that are specific to British-Russian relations have come to bear, said James Nixey, manager of the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House, the foreign policy research organization.
"We are perhaps looking at one of the worst situations since the 1970s," Nixey said in an interview. "This came about ostensibly because of one issue, but there are a whole host of factors that come into play that reflect a difference in values and interests between the two countries."
In his statement, Miliband said that Britain believed that Russia was a "key international partner" in areas like bilateral trade and the fight against terrorism, but that "we need a relationship based on trust and respect."
He added: "Russia wants the EU and the U.K. to open their borders to free movement of people, goods and services, as part of an intensification of relations.
"This needs to be matched by an equal Russian commitment to cross-border judicial cooperation."
