Mikhail Kamynin, spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, announcing the the expulsion of four British diplomats. (Alexei Boitsov/ Bloomberg News)

MOSCOW: Russia expelled four British diplomats Thursday in response to Britain's expulsion of the same number of Russian diplomats this week over Moscow's refusal to extradite a major suspect in the fatal radiation poisoning of a former KGB agent in London last year.

Russia will also tighten visa requirements on British government officials traveling to Russia, in response to a similar move announced by Britain on Monday, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mikhail Kamynin, said in a statement.

The nature of the reaction suggests that the Russian authorities want to avoid any escalation over the poisoning case, which has unraveled into a bruising and drawn-out scandal for the Kremlin.

In his first public comments on the tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions, President Vladimir Putin said he believed that relations with Britain would now "develop normally."

"It is necessary to measure one's actions against common sense, respect the legitimate interests of partners, and everything will be all right," Putin said, according to Reuters. "I think we will overcome this minicrisis."
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Kamynin said the four British Embassy employees in Moscow had been declared persona non grata and would be required to leave Russia within 10 days, the same conditions the British announced for the Russian diplomats.

"From now on we shall act in a mirrorlike fashion in regard to all visa related issues," he said.

Kamynin also said Russia would suspend counterterrorism cooperation between the FSB, successor to the KGB, and the principal security agencies in Britain. Any further cooperation "in the field of fighting terrorism is impossible," he said.

In a statement on Monday, the Russian Foreign Ministry suggested that Britain had first announced a refusal to cooperate with the FSB on counterterrorism. Counterterrorism cooperation - which was strengthened at Russia's initiative after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when Putin was the first foreign leader to telephone President George W. Bush to offer assistance - had been held up as a bright spot in the otherwise cool relations between Russia and the West.

Kamynin also said Britain's ambassador to Russia, Tony Brenton, had been summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry and notified of other countermeasures, which were not specified in the spokesman's statement.

Finally, he said, Brenton had been told that Russia perceived Britain's expulsion of Russian diplomats as "unfriendly conduct."

Neither side named the diplomats who became persona non grata. Britain announced its expulsions on Monday, in response to Russia's refusal to extradite the man accused of poisoning Aleksandr Litvinenko, who died on Nov. 23 after ingesting the radioactive isotope polonium-210.

Russia's uncharacteristically subdued response came as the Kremlin is facing a din of criticism from Europe and the United States over the case and suggested a desire to wind down the dispute, Pavel Felgenhauer, a defense columnist at Novaya Gazeta in Moscow, said in a telephone interview.

On Thursday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked for Russia's "full cooperation" in the extradition request and the European Union issued a statement supporting Britain.

"A terrible crime was committed on British soil and Britain has to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice," Rice said on the sidelines of a Middle East peace conference in Portugal. "It is not in anybody's interests that you can have a crime committed of this kind and nothing be done about it."

Litvinenko had been a vocal critic of Putin's leadership, among other things accusing his former employer, the FSB, of being behind a series of residential apartment buildings in Moscow in 1999 that killed more than 300 people, something the Russian government denies.

British prosecutors have said that they have enough evidence to prove that another former KGB agent, Andrei Lugovoi, administered the lethal dose into Litvinenko's tea at a meeting last November. But Russian officials say their Constitution prohibits extraditing citizens to other countries to stand trial.

Litvinenko, on his deathbed, accused Putin of ordering his murder, something the Kremlin denies.

On Thursday, the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, partly upheld a complaint filed by a former FSB officer, Mikhail Trepashkin, who had led an independent investigation of the 1999 apartment bombings and was an associate of Litvinenko. Trepashkin, who had been hired as an outside expert by victims' relatives at a trial, also claimed to have found evidence linking the explosions to FSB operatives. But Trepashkin never testified in court; he was arrested for illegal possession of a gun and later convicted of revealing state secrets.

In a ruling posted on the European court Web site Thursday, judges upheld Trepashkin's claim that he was treated harshly while in custody. Trepashkin claimed that he had been mistreated by being held "in an insect-ridden cell, without heating or natural light, and that he had to wash using the lavatory." The court ordered the Russian government to pay a fine. It rejected a separate claim from Trepashkin of false arrest. Russian citizens have recourse to the court under treaty because Russia is a member of the Council of Europe.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/19/asia/poison.php