David Cameron’s trip to Russia: the message Moscow needs to hear

Daily Telegraph

In his mission to rescue Anglo-Russian relations, David Cameron must insist on a radical clean-up in its economy, says Tony Brenton, Britain’s former ambassador.

David Cameron today visits Moscow. This is not a routine item in his diary. No British prime minister has made a bilateral visit to Russia since 2005, and no Russian president has travelled to London since 2006. This has been an extraordinarily long gap in formal encounters between the leaders of two such significant countries.

The hiatus goes back to late 2006 and the murder in London of Alexander Litvinenko. Russia refused to answer questions about apparent links of the FSB (Russia’s security agency) to the affair, or to extradite the suspected murderer. Relations accordingly went into the deep freeze. We shut off contacts with the FSB and expelled a number of Russian diplomats. The Russians retaliated with their own expulsions and put brutal pressure on our cultural arm, the British Council (in an act described by one observer as “like hitting a librarian”).

Shell’s and BP’s huge Russian operations were at about the same time heavily leant on by Russian officialdom. As British ambassador, I found myself being hounded by a Kremlin-supported youth group, and vividly recall that, for my last few months, there were no high-level UK/Russian contacts at all.
Time moves on, but some things in Russia haven’t changed. While Dmitry Medvedev enjoys the title of President, Vladimir Putin continues to call the real shots. For understandable reasons, he is popular with most ordinary Russians. They are richer, more secure and in some ways freer (to travel, for instance) than they have ever been.

But there is a dark side. Russia’s ruling elite has become immovable and predatory, elections are fixed, corruption is on a par with Nigeria, the legal system is pliable, and the police and security agencies untouchable. Two recent scandals underline how bad things now are – the extraordinary inability of the Russian system to prosecute, or even sack, senior government officials who committed a huge fraud and then brought about the death in custody of the brave lawyer who exposed it; and yet another blatantly rigged trial of the leading opposition oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

And the global economic crash has made things harder for the government. A population used to fast-rising living standards is having to tighten its belt. Falling oil prices almost brought financial collapse and showed how close Russia now is to an Arab-style petro-economy. Unnerved by the crisis, rich Russians decided en masse to move their money to places where their property rights are less subject to official whim.

And it is not only money that is leaving. The young and the mobile are increasingly seeking lives in countries not ruled by a “party of thieves and swindlers”. More than a million have left over the past three years. My city, Cambridge, is full of bright Russians who view their homeland with a very Russian affection but who have no intention of living there under present circumstances. Medvedev himself has caught the widespread disenchantment with his observation that the country faces a new “period of stagnation”.

All of this gives Russia strong reasons to try to improve cooperation with the West. If she is to diversify her economy away from oil and gas, she will need Western capital and technology. In the oil and gas sector, it is Western (and notably British) companies, not Russian ones, that have the technology necessary to get to Russia’s increasingly remote reserves. And key Russians know that, if Russia is really to prosper, she needs to create a much cleaner and more transparent business and legal environment.
I am constantly struck by the number of businessmen I meet who cheerfully take on the challenges offered by India or China but who blench when I suggest they might do business in Russia. Russia knows she needs to draw on Western experience to overcome such attitudes. She is particularly keen to learn from us what has made the City of London such a world-beater. So, for Russia, there is a lot to be gained from a warmer relationship with the UK.

What’s in it for us? The short answer is business. Russia’s growth prospects may have been diminished by the crash, but they still remain significantly greater than those of the stagnant West. Even given the widely advertised (and often exaggerated) difficulties of doing business in Russia, British companies should be hungry to get into this populous and fast-growing market. Since in Russia all big business is heavily political, it is good that the Prime Minister is showing his support by taking a party of senior businessmen with him.

But the ultimate prize is much more than British jobs and profits, important though they are. For too long, Russia has been a European outlier; impoverished, oppressive and resentful. By making ourselves open to Russia – tourists, students, businessmen – we put the qualities of our society on display and encourage them to want the best of it.

By contributing through trade and investment to raising Russian prosperity, we assist the rise of a Russian middle class who are already beginning to demand the same democratic and legal rights as we have. It will take time, but it is these pressures that will eventually turn Russia into the normal European country we all want her to become.

Finally, there is foreign policy. In an unstable time, it is important that the UK and Russia, both key foreign policy actors, work together where possible. The Russians see the world very differently from us. In their eyes, Nato is a threat, Central Asia may be run by nasty dictators, but at least they keep the fundamentalists down, China is an increasingly potent neighbour with whom it is better to cooperate than contend, Georgia is an irritant that has already caused two wars (they will not have forgotten David Cameron’s visit to Tblisi during the second of these), and Western human-rights activism is no more than badly camouflaged power politics.

There are, nevertheless, areas where we can and must work together, notably over Iran’s nuclear ambitions and our shared interest in keeping Afghanistan out of fundamentalist hands. On the most dramatic political development of recent months, the Arab Spring, we have usually been at loggerheads. Russia (perhaps with an eye to the implications for her own Mubarak-style political system) has been uniformly hostile to the popular movements that have now brought down three Arab dictators. Perhaps the Prime Minister’s most interesting discussion in Moscow will be about the likely fourth – Syria’s Assad – and the damage Russia is doing to its influence in the region by consistently backing the losing side.
David Cameron’s visit to Moscow today will not be easy. He will get no movement on the Litvinenko dossier. He should make it clear that the surge of British investment the Russians want to see will largely depend on a much cleaner and law-bound economic environment than Russia currently offers. And he will be conscious that there are few votes in being photographed shaking hands with despots, even soft ones.

On the Russian side, there will be a traditional suspicion of British perfidiousness, and a firm determination not to let the West interfere in its internal political affairs. The smiles at the closing press conference will not be so wide as to suggest that either side has conceded anything vital to the other. Nevertheless, there is serious business to be done – on commercial exchanges, on shared regulatory experience, on making the world a safer place.

The Russians plainly see the visit as important: Cameron will meet not only Medvedev, but also with the real power in the land, Putin. It is good that the top-level gap that we have had in UK/Russian relations for the past five years is about to be filled.

• Sir Anthony Brenton was British Ambassador to Russia, 2004-08 hairy girls срочный займ www.zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/how-to-get-fast-payday-loan-online.php срочный займ на карту онлайн