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#10 - JRL 7234
Sunday Telegraph (UK)
June 22, 2003
Simpson on Sunday:
Putin is ready to mend fences with Britain
By John Simpson
John Simpson is the BBC's World Affairs Editor

The last time Londoners saw the white, blue and red of Peter the Great's Russian tricolour hanging in their streets in such profusion, was in 1874. Then the state landau carried the spare, nervous, bewhiskered form of Tsar Alexander II, the would-be liberal who freed Russia's serfs but was eventually murdered by the revolutionaries and bomb-throwers of the young generation because he didn't go far enough. The big issues of the day between Britain and Russia included Turkey's future, and Russia's secretive, unrelenting determination to lunge at British India from Central Asia.

Russia and Britain have come down in the world since then, yet they remain major world powers. The new Tsar, Vladimir Putin, has stabilized his country and reversed its frightening decline. Russia is at last creating genuine wealth. The gangster culture has peaked.

Russia's remaining independent newspaper columnists mock Mr Putin by calling him a dead ringer for Dobby in the last Harry Potter film, but he ignores them. Neither Alexander II nor Stalin looked like Dobby, but if they had it wouldn't have been a good career move to point it out. Under Vladimir Putin Russia's press faces some serious problems, but making fun of the head of state is still possible.

There is, though, an abiding whiff of the KGB about Mr Putin, and a feeling that it is the intelligence community rather than democratic politics which has calmed Russia down and improved its prospects. Still, however weird the process which brought Mr Putin to the presidency, he has clearly established himself as his own man.

Many of the old, unreconstructed policies of Soviet days still apply. Officially the Foreign Office says, deadpan, that it notes continued moves towards humanitarian reforms in Chechnya; they're distinctly hard to spot. When the door closes on Tony Blair's meeting with Mr Putin at noon next Thursday, we can expect a crisp sentence or two from the British side about the unnecessary degree of violence which Russia continues to use against the Chechens.

Since it will only be a half-hour meeting, and 15 minutes of that will be taken up with translation, our old friend the "full and frank exchange of views" will not, however, be making an appearance. Most Russian commentators think the brevity of the meeting is a slap in the face from Tony Blair for the way Mr Putin treated him at their summit in April, embarrassing him by publicly contradicting the increasingly desperate British line about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Perhaps it is; yet one of Mr Blair's most engaging habits is his readiness to forgive, and it was noticeable that he made a reference last week to Chechen rebels fighting for Saddam Hussein against the Americans and British. It was something carefully calculated to please Mr Putin, who likes to present Chechen resistance to the Russian onslaught as Islamic terrorism, plain and simple. Quite where the Chechen rebels were in Iraq beats me; but that doesn't mean they weren't there, simply that no one else seems to have referred to them.

The fact is that none of the current differences between London and Moscow is of any great importance in the long life of the relationship. Britain and Russia have been getting on and offending each other in roughly equal proportions for 450 years, ever since poor Sir Hugh Willoughby perished in the White Sea in 1553, trying to find a route to China, and his deputy Richard Chancellor led the expedition's survivors to Moscow.

The basis of the relationship - then as now - is partly strategic and partly commercial. Two important countries on the edges of Europe are always going to feel a certain tactical affinity, as a defence against the countries in the continent's heart. What else could have brought together Stalin and the man who sent British troops into Russia at the end of the First World War to snuff out the Soviet revolution? Churchill had no liking for Stalin (and was appalled by Roosevelt's willingness to appease Russia) but he needed him. Mr Blair needs Mr Putin now, and vice versa.

And, like Richard Chancellor, the British can smell money in Moscow again. British trade with Russia is back up to the level that it reached in 1977. When BP and Shell put huge amounts of capital into Russian oil in a month or so, Britain will be the largest investor in Russia this year; and at last investment there is beginning to look pretty sound.

Things do change. On Friday a journalist boldly asked Mr Putin at a big Moscow press conference what he was most ashamed of. "The poverty of my people," he replied. Good question, good answer. Things aren't fantastic in Russia, but they're getting better.

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