Strongman, The

from healing the rift, it widened even further after Miliband’s meeting with Lavrov. In December the Kremlin announced it was closing two British Council offices in Russia, on the pretext of unpaid taxes and irregularities in its official status. Many saw it as an own goal, since the British Council’s main tasks include teaching English and organising cultural exchanges. But Lavrov decided the offices were ‘in violation of an international convention on consular relations’ – while at the same time explicitly saying the action was further retaliation for Britain’s ‘unilateral actions’ against Russia – specifically the freezing of negotiations on visa facilitation.
    David Miliband looks back at his time jousting with Lavrov and sees it is a clash of post-imperial nations. ‘I’ve come to believe that Russia believes that Britain is a declining power and Britain believes that Russia is a declining power. That is a recipe, not for misapprehension, but it’s a recipe for the sort of toughness and difficulty and, in some ways, unwillingness to compromise, that seems to go with the territory of British–Russian relations.’
    For five years political contacts between the two countries remained virtually frozen. And even after a new prime minister, David Cameron, visited Moscow in September 2011, relations remained in the doldrums, beached on the sandbar of that atrocious Cold War murder in London in 2006.
    Showing initiative
    The spate of murders, which would continue over the coming years, destroyed Putin’s attempts to portray his country as a free and modern democracy. Dozens of journalists were murdered in Vladimir Putin’s two terms as president. Not all the cases were politically motivated, and few of the victims had the stature of Anna Politkovskaya. But hardly any of the murders have been solved, giving the impression that journalists can be killed with impunity in Russia, especially if they have angered the authorities. The journalist Politkovskaya and the political exile Litvinenko had both earned themselves enemies in high places. They were extremely hostile to the Putin regime – indeed both wrote in rather similar terms, accusing the FSB of terrible subversive acts that allegedly sacrificed hundreds of innocent lives in order to shore up the regime.
    In his investigation of the Litvinenko affair, Martin Sixsmith concludes that Putin himself did not order the killing, but that he can be implicated in the affair ‘because he created the atmosphere and conditions in which the killing could take place, in which an enterprising group of current or former FSB men read the signals from the Kremlin and embarked on their own initiative.’ 12 I think the same can be said about the Politkovskaya murder. In both cases, it is likely that the assassins did not receive, or even require, a direct order, nor did they need permission to kill, because they knew that ‘taking out’ an ‘enemy of the state’ had the tacit approval of the authorities. They may have been acting on their own initiative, for revenge or to ‘please’ their masters. Either way, they knew they would not be punished.
    The very fact that the FSB had a unit known as URPO, whose operatives specialised in unlawful killings, speaks volumes about Russia today. The unit may have been disbanded by Putin, but it would be naïve to think that the FSB has suddenly become a club of amiable Clouseaus. Or that the fair trial and the jury have replaced the revolver and the phial of polonium.

 
    9
MEDIA, MISSILES, MEDVEDEV
    A Western PR machine
    Two thousand and six should have been a landmark year in Russia’s post-communist history, and in President Putin’s campaign to bring his country back to prominence as a respected and valued player on the world stage. Russia had become a member of the G8 group of leading industrialised nations in 1997, and this year, for the first time, it was its turn to chair it – a chance to shape the global agenda and to impress with a flawless summit in July, to be hosted by Putin in his home town, St Petersburg.
    As we have seen, however, the year began with Russia cutting off gas supplies to Ukraine – hardly the image it was looking for. In the preceding months Putin had already unnerved the West with a series of moves aimed at tightening his own grip on power and stifling the opposition, including his curbs on NGOs and the unleashing of the youth group Nashi to cow both political opponents and