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20.09.07
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Not The Queen's England
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Comment by Alexei Pankin
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Why is the UK Even Involved in the Litvinenko Case?
During August, the month when most of Russia goes on vacation, there was a lull in the ongoing battle between Russia and the UK over the Alexander Litvinenko case. But as the month ended, the two sides began exchanging blows again.
The disgraced oligarch Boris Berezovsky blissfully resides in London as a political refugee even as he tops Russia's “most wanted” list. Berezovsky’s home country has been demanding his extradition for many years now. At the very end of August, he published an article in the London Sunday Times, which, in effect, calls for Putin’s overthrow by revolutionary means, urging the governments of Western democracies to take an active part in the process.
On the Russian side, three days after the article was published, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, the chief suspects in the Litvinenko case, were interviewed live by British journalists on Ekho Moskvy radio. This gave them an opportunity to mock and insult both the British press and the British courts. It doesn’t take extraordinary acumen to predict that this vitriolic exchange in the media will soon be followed by comparable political developments.
If you make a list of the chief actors in this year’s Russo-British drama - Putin, Berezovsky, Zakayev, Litvinenko, Lugovoi, Kovtun, Goldfarb – it doesn't contain a single British surname, which begs the question: what does the UK have to do with this mess? Actually, it seems like a typical conflict within the circle of Boris Berezovsky. Putin was Berezovsky’s candidate to succeed Yeltsin, while Litvinenko functioned as Berezovsky’s representative in the secret services, whom he later transferred to London and supplied with a residence permit. Lugovoi and Kovtun were again Berezovsky’s business partners; Zakayev is his prot?g? and Goldfarb manages his fund.
Berezovsky doesn’t like Putin now because as soon as his prot?g? became Russia’s president, he reversed the rules of the game: instead of backing up his former patron’s wealth and power with the authority of the state, he suggested that the oligarchs, including Berezovsky, be kept at a distance from political decision-making. To add insult to injury, Putin deprived Berezovsky of his chief media outlets and, finally, kicked him out of the country.
At the same time, the president cannot forget Berezovsky’s leading role in his rise to power, as well as the oligarch’s attempts during Putin’s first years in office to remind him who his benefactor was by every conceivable means.
It all boils down to an interpersonal grievance that has reached the scale of a global showdown. The mighty state apparatus has naturally taken Putin’s side. Russia’s prosecutor general appears to have no other concerns aside from opening one criminal case after another against Berezovsky and looking for traces of his involvement in the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya as well as Litvinenko.
For the prosecutor's office, the desire to extradite Berezovsky has become all-consuming. Berezovsky, on the other hand, has his extraordinary wealth, which he is willing to sacrifice in the struggle against Putin’s regime. He is prepared to form alliances with anyone who shares his hatred toward the Russian president: liberals, communists, Russian nationalists, Ukrainian orangists. He has spared no expense to wage countless media wars against Putin.
As a result of this squabble between two maniacally obsessed antagonists, even sane people are beginning to waver, split between two mutually exclusive and equally absurd assumptions: either Putin ordered Litvinenko’s assassination, as the latter was one of Berezovsky’s closest accomplices, or else it was Berezovsky who knocked him off in order to spite Putin.
Both hypotheses begin to appear equally plausible. But it is important to remember that this personal battle is being played out by the governments of two nations. Imagine for a moment that Russo-British relations no longer centered around this purely Russian screaming match. All of a sudden, it becomes clear that, by and large, the political and business relations between the two countries are fine.
I can understand the British court’s refusal to extradite Berezovsky without receiving a well-founded proof of his guilt. But if you ask an average person in the street why Berezovsky was given political asylum in Britain, most people will say: “He must have bribed the right official.”
In recent years, the UK has become a very popular destination spot for New Russian money. Naturally, these are not just investments into real estate or football clubs, but an attempt to place illegally obtained capital under the protection of British law.
In the case of the Chelsea football club, it is also an attempt to purchase respectability. I was brought up an Anglophile and I refuse to believe that the UK has grown so poor that it desperately needs such “investments.” Will the oldest parliamentary republic degenerate into a laundromat for the money stolen from the Russian people, sacrificing its relationship with Russia in the process? |
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