Mary Dejevsky: Don't blame Russia – it's our fault as well

There is a view, enthusiastically peddled in certain British circles, according to which Russia is generally spiky, malevolent and anti-social. Every country in the world, the argument goes, has a problem with Russia – and this is how it will be until either Vladimir Putin leaves public life entirely, or his successor as president, Dmitry Medvedev, forswears the Putin legacy.

Now such a view may console hard-pressed British diplomats and others at the sharp end of British-Russia relations, but it is actually not quite true. Russia in its post-Soviet, energy-rich mode is not the easiest country for anyone to get along with, but few have found it quite so difficult in recent years as Britain.

Which is why yesterday's first meeting between Gordon Brown and Medvedev in Hokkaido deserved more attention than it received, and perhaps also whyboth sides, but especially the British , downplayed its significance. Ever since Thatcher met Gorbachev, and hailed him, correctly, as a different kind of Russian leader, British prime ministers have fancied they could spot a "good" one. Tony Blair tried the same trick with Putin and came spectacularly unstuck. At least, with this quiet encounter on the other side of the world, Brown avoided raising expectations.

Any results from yesterday's talks – beyond the standard platitudes, that is – will probably take weeks or even months to materialise. But the first step to improved relations has to include an acknowledgement that there is as much of a Britain problem as a Russia problem. Rather than blaming Russia's prickliness for all that goes wrong, we should be asking whether there is not something about Britain in particular that rubs the Kremlin up the wrong way (and vice versa).

In fact, there is a great deal. Britain is unique in the number of recent Russian émigrés it has attracted to live here. A few are seen by Russia as heinous criminals. The very same individuals are treated here as political refugees. This divide is simply not going to be bridged for the foreseeable future. There is no point in our preaching justice, democracy and rule of law as universal values, unless we can stomach similar sermons preached back at us about harbouring felons and defying international law over Iraq.

Britain is also unique in the scale and sensitivity of its business relations with Russia. Where other European countries have diversified investments in Russia, and the United States has left pretty much alone, British dealings are heavily weighted towards financial services and, above all, energy.

Both were areas of particular skulduggery during the Russian privatisations of the 1990s. What is more, property rights are still not as we understand them, and unlikely to be sorted out in a way that conforms to international practice for some time. Yet we behave as though the fate of British companies was directly linked to the dignity of the state. The current dispute between the British and Russian halves of the oil company TNK-BP is a case in point. The Kremlin can hardly be blamed for a vulnerability built into a business structure that BP entered into willingly.

Most other disputes between Britain and Russia are products of these. Russian spies are cavorting around London because they can vanish in the big Russian population and because the British are no slouches at covert activity either.

The British Council – the cultural arm of British diplomacy – has encountered problems partly because it was a soft target in a time of fraught relations, but partly, too, because the British were more single-minded than many others about "values". They also mixed the commercial and cultural in a way that other countries did not and so left the British Council exposed in Russian law.

Whatever happened – and we still do not know the truth – the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko exemplified every possible element of British-Russian conflict. Spying, radiation, democracy, and murky business deals were all there, followed by a clash of laws and the demand – perceived as arrogant by Russia – that it change its constitution to suit us. Diplomatic expulsions a year ago consigned relations to the deep freeze.

Britain likes to rationalise its almost uniquely bad relations with Russia as the result of Moscow's policy of "divide and rule" towards Europe. But there is an element of wishful thinking on Britain's part – even deliberate misinterpretation. There are certainly cracks in the EU for Russia to exploit, not least between the former Soviet-bloc countries and "old" Europe: Germany's appetite for Russian gas, Italy's special relationship with Putin, France's greater flexibility on "values".

Taking everything together, though, it is Britain that is most often out on a limb. If Gordon Brown tried to remedy that in Hokkaido, perhaps we can finally look forward to a clearing of the British-Russian air.

m.dejevsky@independent.co.uk

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