Russia orders British Council to shut down operations

Times Online, December 12, 2007

The Foreign Office today angrily rejected a Kremlin demand that the British Council close down all its operations in Russia except for those of its headquarters in Moscow.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said this morning that the Council, which promotes British culture and offers English language lessons through its 15 regional offices in Russia, had no legal basis for its operations and should close down its regional offices by the new year.

The move was seen as a retaliation for the expulsion of four Russian diplomats from Britain in July, in a continuing row over the murder in London last year of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko. British prosecutors have named Andrei Lugovoy, a former KGB agent, as the prime suspect in the murder, but Moscow has refused to extradite him.

A Foreign Office spokeswoman said that the activities of the Council were compliant with both international and Russian law under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and a bilateral cultural agreement from 1994.

"The British Council engages in a broad and hugely popular range of activity across Russia, which directly benefits hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians," she said.

"It is a cultural, not a political institution and we strongly reject any attempt to link it to Russia’s failure to co-operate with our efforts to bring the murder of Alexander Litvinenko to justice."

The Council itself said that it had no plans to close down its offices in St Petersburg and Ekaterinburg, and was backed by Gordon Brown, whose official spokesman told reporters: "We, the Council and its Russian partner organisations have every intention that its programme will continue."

A spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry said that a new bilateral agreement to regulate the Council's activities, drawn up after the diplomatic expulsions from the UK in July, had not been signed. He also accused the Council, a registered charity, of violating Russian tax laws.

Tony Halpin, the Times's Moscow correspondent, said that the move appeared to be a diplomatic flexing of muscles by Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, who cemented his grip on power after anointing his successor this week.

Mr Putin recommended on Monday that Dmitri Medvedev, his 42-year-old protege, should be the next President, and Mr Medvedev then indicated that Mr Putin should be the next Prime Minister of Russia, keeping the immensely popular head of state at the heart of power in the Kremlin.

"What is really behind this is another effort to squeeze British interests, in the row the began over Litvinenko," said Halpin.

"It is election season now, and Mr Putin thinks he is completely invulnerable and can do what he likes. Relations between Britain and Russia are very, very strained, so squeezing out the British Council is a way of demonstrating how bad those relations have become.

"Moscow has never been very happy with the fact that the British Council gives English lessons and runs exams - they see it as a contamination with unwelcome ideas.

"The Kremlin has always been terrified of a repeat of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which it has seen as having been fomented by foreign NGOs using foreign money.

"The British Council is a very high profile organisation, one of the best-known organisations in the world, and if Moscow can wage war on the council then it sends a powerful message to all the other foreign NGOs."

(Jenny Booth)

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