As always, it's my own fault

Luke Harding, a correspondent for the British newspaper The Guardian, was expelled from Russia because he violated the rules of accreditation of foreign journalists, as stated in a commentary on the website of the Russian Foreign Ministry. The department claims that “having requested and received an extension of accreditation at the end of November last year, Harding left Moscow for London on his business without receiving the foreign correspondent’s certificate issued to him, although he knew about the need to do so.”

“If Harding is still interested in working in Russia for the period of validity of his entry visa, then he needs to resolve issues related to his accreditation through the Department of Information and Press of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. If these rules, uniform for all foreign correspondents, are followed, there will be no problems with Harding’s entry into the Russian Federation,” the statement says.

However, Harding told RIA Novosti that if he had not been deported immediately upon arrival from London, he would have appeared at the department and collected his ID.

As Deputy Foreign Minister David Lidington told British parliamentarians, Harding had previously had problems with the Russian authorities. In particular, he received warnings in connection with traveling to “secret areas and border zones” without permission, and in November 2010 his accreditation was renewed only after the intervention of British diplomats, the deputy minister said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed that the country’s authorities had complaints about Harding’s trips to the “counter-terrorist operation zone.” “He admitted that he really did wrong and asked, as an exception, to extend his visa until May, which was done,” the minister said.

Let us recall that, as stated by the leader of the opposition movement “Democratic Choice” Vladimir Milov, Harding helped him and Boris Nemtsov in working on the report “Putin. Results. 10 years,” in the part that talked about the role of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the success of the Gunvor oil company, owned by his friend Gennady Timchenko.

At the same time, a source in the presidential administration told Kommersant that most likely the decision to expel Harding was made by the security forces without consulting anyone. Until a vague explanation appeared about an alleged violation of accreditation rules by Harding, no one in the Kremlin or the Foreign Ministry could name the reason for the expulsion of the journalist.