Strongman, The

deadlock. Lugovoi used the time to have himself elected to the Duma, where he would enjoy immunity from prosecution. He freely gave interviews, in which he blamed Boris Berezovsky for the murder.
    On 28 June 2007 a cabinet reshuffle gave Britain a new foreign secretary, David Miliband. He spent his first weekend with briefing papers that shocked him. ‘What I hadn’t quite recognised,’ he recalled in an interview, ‘was the rotten state of Anglo-Russian relations, dating back to Iraq and then to the whole Berezovsky business, which the Russians saw as a political move by us. So there was a deep political problem, even without the terrible events of the murder of Litvinenko.’ 10
    A week later the Kremlin turned down Britain’s request for the extradition of Lugovoi. ‘We had to decide how to respond, and we didn’t want the Russians to go wildly over the top – we didn’t want to break off diplomatic relations.’ Britain expelled four Russian diplomats and froze relations with the FSB, even though that meant cutting off the main channel for collaboration in the fight against international terrorism. It is not clear whether the British side actually understood this. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, recalls: ‘We had to explain that the FSB, in the Russian Federation, is the lead agency that coordinates anti-terrorist activities and heads the national anti-terrorism committee. So if cooperation with the FSB was no longer in the plans of our British counterparts, we would have to freeze our cooperation in that area, and this was regrettable.’ 11
    Russia expelled four British diplomats in retaliation, and sneered at London’s persistent request for extradition. President Putin reminded Britain that ‘30 people are hiding out in London who are wanted by Russian law enforcement agencies for serious crimes – and London does not even think of extraditing them’. He was sitting, in classic Putin fashion, in a forest clearing, discussing current affairs with youth activists. He went on: ‘They don’t extradite people hiding on their own territory, and give insulting advice to our country to change our constitution. They need to change their brains, not our constitution.’
    Clearly relations had hit rock bottom. It was time for Miliband to try to calm things. ‘We had to cooperate together on Iran, on terrorism, even on climate change. So I suggested that we meet with foreign minister Lavrov, and we proposed that we meet him in the UN building in September. It was important to show that we were open for business on the diplomatic front, even though we were pursuing justice in the Litvinenko case.’
    The rookie British foreign minister was in for a shock. Lavrov had practically lived in the UN headquarters for about 17 years, including ten as Russia’s envoy. He is one of the shrewdest operators I have met, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of two decades of diplomacy. He likes to chain-smoke, sip whisky and deploy his arguments like rapiers. ‘I went in with a football analogy,’ Miliband recalls. ‘I was talking to him about which football team he supported, but I got very short shrift on that, and then the rest of the 30 to 40-minute meeting was a very, very tough lesson in diplomacy from someone who felt that they’d been around the block, they knew what the score was and they weren’t going to take any lessons from me. So it was a pretty robust encounter and a pretty tough way to start a relationship.’
    In fact, Lavrov has a different memory of Miliband’s small talk, equally inappropriate. He recalls with a laugh: ‘David started our conversation by asking why our party, United Russia, was a partner of the Tories, and not the Labour Party. For me, it was unexpected. Inter-party cooperation has nothing to do with me, but he was extremely interested in this.’ As for fresh ideas on how to get over the Litvinenko crisis, says Lavrov, ‘I heard nothing. I repeated the Russian position, including the prosecutor general’s offer to open a joint investigation with the British, if they were provided with all the materials at the disposal of British investigators.’
    Putin had referred to Britain’s ‘insulting’ demand as a ‘remnant of colonial thinking’, and Lavrov took up the theme. Miliband recalls: ‘He said we needed to stop looking at ourselves as an imperial power, who could tell other countries to change their constitutions. He was absolutely clear about that.’
    Far