Tim Marrs

“THE Russian government,” David Miliband, Britain's new, young foreign secretary, told Parliament on Monday July 16th, “has failed to register either how seriously we treat this case or the seriousness of the issues involved, despite lobbying at the highest level.” The case is the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-KGB agent who was murdered by radioactive poisoning in London last November. Russia's failure to treat it with due seriousness, said Mr Miliband, would result in the expulsion of four Russian diplomats from London, the first such evictions since 1996—prompting widespread if hasty talk of a “new cold war”.

In May, British prosecutors announced their intention to prosecute Andrei Lugovoi, another ex-KGB agent, for Litvinenko's murder. Mr Lugovoi met Litvinenko in London on November 1st, the day he fell ill; traces of polonium, the poison that led to his “horrifying and lingering death”, as Mr Miliband described it, were found at hotels in which Mr Lugovoi stayed and in aircraft on which he travelled. But Britain's request that he be extradited has been denied by the Russians, who cite a ban set out in their constitution on handing over Russian citizens to other countries. That ban, Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, has said, makes the extradition request “foolish”.

The British case is that, if the Russians really wanted to co-operate—and to be seen to take seriously the obligations that come with freedom of movement for Russians—they would find a way around the constitutional problem, as indeed they have done in some previous cases. But more generally, the British are cross with Russia's general failure to co-operate. The Russians say that, in theory, Mr Lugovoi could be tried in Moscow, but have shown little appetite for that possibility, which in any case would be unsatisfactory, say the British, because of the corrupt and compromised state of the Russian courts.

Still, there is little chance that the diplomatic expulsions, and the other measures announced by Mr Miliband (including as-yet vague visa restrictions for Russian officials) will lead to a change of heart in the Kremlin over the extradition. The motive for them is rather to express the extent of Britain's anger over the murder of a British subject (as Mr Litvinenko had become), perpetrated in a way that jeopardised the health of hundreds of other people too—anger partly stoked by the possibility that a Russian state agency was involved.

Mr Lugovoi continues to protest his innocence, as he has done since he was first incriminated. In doing so, and in attempting to finger Britain's security services for the crime, along with Russian exiles in London such as Boris Berezovsky, he seems to have been doing the bidding of the Russian government. That, plus the exotic rarity of the poison, has confirmed the suspicion in some quarters that Russia's Federal Security Service, if not Mr Putin himself, had a hand in the murder.

For all that, the notion of a new cold war is overblown: Russia is no longer exporting a rival ideology, as the Soviet Union did, nor fighting proxy wars with America around the globe. Yet tensions in the Anglo-Russian relationship, and in Russia's relations with the West in general, could worsen because of the Litvinenko affair. Relations with Britain have been strained by Britain's granting of asylum to Mr Berezovsky and others: last year there was a scandal involving alleged British spying in Moscow; Britain's ambassador there had been harassed, allegedly because of his attendance at an opposition conference. The Russian response to the expulsions—expected on July 17th—may yet escalate matters. Spokesmen have given warning of “serious consequences” and described the British position as “immoral.”

If so, that could diminish further the prospects of Russian co-operation over international problems such as the status of Kosovo and Iran's nuclear ambitions. Mr Putin this week pulled Russia out of the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, a post-Soviet agreement designed to regulate the conventional military hardware stationed on the continent. It could also have consequences for British investors in Russia, some of whom—such as BP—have already suffered from the Kremlin's bullying, extra-legal methods. Mr Miliband and Gordon Brown, the new prime minister, evidently decided that those risks were outweighed by the danger of doing nothing.