Relations between Britain and Vladimir Putin's Russia began with warm embraces but are now mired in bitterness, writes Seamus Martin
As the new millennium dawned Vladimir Putin, seen by the Russian public as a dull apparatchik, faced strong challenges in his campaign for the presidency. Viewed as a minor figure, he needed recognition as someone with a presence on the international stage. The election campaign was in full swing and, like the Seventh Cavalry in the old Western movies, Tony Blair rode to the rescue.
In March 2000, just two weeks before polling day, pictures of the prime minister and the presidential candidate dominated Russian TV coverage. There were talks at the Kremlin, an evening at the theatre in which the Putins and the Blairs were shown as good friends. In effect, Blair took part in Putin's campaign and endorsed him as the West's candidate.
Now, eight years later, murder, intrigue, espionage, tit-for-tat expulsions and harassment of officials have reduced UK-Russian relations to cold war levels.
This downward trend has been portrayed in the British media as having begun in November 2006 with the murder of former KGB operative and naturalised British subject Alexander Litvinenko.
The refusal of a request for the extradition of the murder suspect Andrei Lugovoy has been portrayed as a brutal rejection of natural justice by the Russians, even though their constitution forbids extradition of citizens to a foreign state.
This refusal was used to justify the expulsion of Russian diplomats from London. Not surprisingly, the Russians retaliated by expelling British diplomats from Moscow. The latest moves have been the closing of two provincial outposts of the British Council in St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, along with alleged harassment of that organisation's officials.
The Litvinenko murder is indefensible, but relationships between the two countries had begun to deteriorate long before that and the Russians were not alone in refusing extradition requests.
Three years before the Litvinenko case Moscow requested the extradition of the London-based Chechen separatist fighter and spokesman Akhmed Zakayev who had participated in open rebellion in the northern Caucasus.
The request was refused and Zakayev was given political asylum. From London he issued statements of support not only for the more moderate of the Chechen rebel forces, but also for the brutal warlord Shamil Basayev who brought new levels of terrorism to Russia.
Not surprisingly, the authorities in Russia were furious at Britain and it does not take a great leap of the imagination to see that London would have been equally enraged had a spokesman for the IRA been allowed to make similar statements from Moscow during the height of the conflict in Northern Ireland.
The second failed Russian extradition application centred on Boris Berezovsky, a billionaire oligarch who has been granted political asylum. Berezovsky is now described in the UK media as a "dissident", a term previously reserved for brave campaigners of absolute probity such as the Nobel Laureate Andrei Sakharov.
That the American journalist, Paul Klebnikov of Forbes magazine, looked at Berezovsky in a different light is amply illustrated by the title of his biography of the Russian tycoon: Godfather of the Kremlin: The Decline of Russia in the Age of Gangster Capitalism. Klebnikov was gunned down in Moscow on July 9th, 2004 following his publication of a list of the 100 richest Russians. Berezovsky was not named as a suspect in his murder but Moscow instead called for his extradition on charges of political corruption and fraud. Britain refused.
While the Litvinenko and Lugovoy cases have rightly received enormous publicity here, the background to Russia's grievances against Britain has warranted scant attention. We appear to be witnessing a situation now, in which two countries with pretensions to great-power status have begun to behave towards each other like name-calling schoolboys. It is not an edifying spectacle.
Seamus Martin is a retired international editor and Moscow correspondent of The Irish Times