Word: russianizing
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Boris Berezovsky isn't the easiest of guests. The 61-year-old Russian exile, granted asylum by Britain in 2003, travels with personal bodyguards, as befits a man who has amassed great wealth and fierce enemies. The Russian government has petitioned Britain to extradite Berezovsky to face fraud charges, while some, claim Berezovsky, have in mind other ends for him. Scotland Yard confirmed on July 18 that a man was arrested last month on suspicion of conspiracy to murder and deported to Russia. Berezovsky said he was the target; according to the Sun newspaper, the hit man planned to shoot...
...successful mission would have generated for the Hilton the kind of lurid publicity that another upscale Mayfair hotel recently garnered. It was in the nearby Millennium Hotel, last November, that Berezovsky's former employee Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian-born British citizen, drank tea contaminated with the radioactive isotope polonium-210, which killed him. British investigators identified as their prime suspect Andrei Lugovoi, like Litvinenko, a former kgb man. Moscow has turned down London's request for Lugovoi's extradition...
...that you need to keep flicking back to the beginning of the book: it could all come from the pages of a cold war thriller. But it is very of the moment. The British government's decision to protest Moscow's refusal to hand over Lugovoi by expelling four Russian diplomats is just the latest manifestation not only of an increasingly bad-tempered spat between two nations, but of the estrangement from the West of Vladimir Putin's Russia...
...West, friend and foe, the dispute between London and Moscow is taking place in a more confusing world. As the Kremlin prepares to take the inevitable retaliatory action against Britain, the motivations of the main players appear mixed. Britain lodged the extradition request for Lugovoi knowing that the Russian constitution rules out the extradition of Russian citizens. The government anticipated this would create an impasse but says the murder on British soil of a British citizen demanded action. The Kremlin, for its part, has been at pains to improve its image abroad, hiring U.S. and British public-relations consultants...
...Moscow, however, efforts by the West to make nice don't seem to have worked. Government officials seem convinced, rather, that the West resents Russia's growing clout. One such official told Time he saw Britain's expulsion of the Russian diplomats as part of an "anti-Russian campaign" backed by the U.S. "The West is pissed off we won the 2014 [winter] Olympics, so they sought a way to prick us," he said. Andrei Kokoshin, a pro-Putin member of the Duma, dismissed the British action as "a political novice [and new Prime Minister] Gordon Brown trying...