Nothing to lose

The Russian Foreign Ministry could not limit itself to only expelling diplomats - after all, the British, having declared four employees of the Russian Embassy persona non grata, also announced a complication of the visa regime for officials. Therefore, in addition to the expulsion of four British embassy employees, they decided to terminate cooperation in the fight against terrorism. Obviously, based on the principle of least damage.

The fact is that cooperation in this area between the two states has long been limited to political statements and demonstrative actions. This was the case, for example, in October 2005, when Vladimir Putin, during a visit to England, visited the headquarters of the COBRA group (Cabinet Office Briefing Room A), which includes the heads of the intelligence services responsible for the fight against terrorism. Two weeks later, Russian generals responsible for the fight against terrorism in the North Caucasus came to England for a visit. Their visit was organized by the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation and was also of a demonstrative nature: in addition to London, the generals were taken to Northern Ireland to exchange experiences, thus legalizing the war in Chechnya for the British establishment.

However, these visits and statements lacked the most important thing - the infrastructure for the exchange of information, which in the fight against terrorism should be daily. All that the two countries had in this area was the so-called joint Russian-British working group on combating terrorism, created in December 2001. On the Russian side, it was headed by Anatoly Safonov, former deputy director of the FSB, and now the special representative of the President of the Russian Federation on international cooperation in the fight against terrorism and transnational organized crime, and on the British side, by the Director for Defense, Strategic Threats and Counter-Terrorism at the British Foreign Office, E. Oakden.

However, this group meets only once a year, and during that time only six meetings were held. By the way, it is unclear when the seventh meeting, which was supposed to take place at the end of 2006, will take place - apparently, this group is assigned the role of victim of an “adequate response.”

In the six years since 9/11, there has been only one example of a joint operation between British and Russian intelligence agencies. In 2003, a group of operatives of the FSB, FBI and MI5 caught the British Hekmat Lakhani, who bought an Igla anti-aircraft missile system in St. Petersburg from an FSB officer, and, under the cover of intelligence services, transported it to the United States, where he tried to resell it to an FBI agent. But this operation also turned out to be a demonstrative action, designed for an external effect: it turned out that the purchase was provoked, and the operation itself was a PR campaign by the intelligence services of three countries.

However, during this time no attempts were made to establish a constant, daily exchange of information.

Perhaps the reason is that the FSB, even after September 11, viewed the British only as junior partners in the war on terrorism. Relations with the United States have always been built on a different basis: even before the war in Afghanistan, Russian intelligence services sent a group of officers to Langley, in 2004 Patrushev signed a memorandum of cooperation with the director of the FBI, and in 2006 a similar memorandum was signed between the FSB and the US Department of Homeland Security. But there are no such agreements between the Russian and British intelligence services.

Meanwhile, in the case of Great Britain, Russia should be more interested in exchanging information than its partner. There is a fairly large Chechen diaspora in the UK, and information from the British could be very interesting. Just one example: back in 1993, even before the first Chechen war, two Chechens sent by Dzhokhar Dudayev to collect money were killed in London - Ruslan Utsiev (he had the status of adviser to the President of Ichkeria on foreign economic issues) and his brother Nazarbek. One of them was an MI5 informant.

However, the FSB apparently focused on another task - putting pressure on the British on the issue of extraditing Zakayev and Berezovsky. Having lost patience, the Russian special services decided at the same time to sacrifice even illusory cooperation with the British.