Russia ready to mend ties with Britain

MOSCOW, March 26 (UPI) -- Russia's incoming President Dmitry Medvedev has said Moscow is ready to break the ice in relations with Britain.

"We can of course restore the entire volume of full bilateral cooperation … without preconditions, understanding the independence of each other's positions," Medvedev said in an interview with Britain's Financial Times newspaper.

Russia's relations with Britain are at an all-time low since the killing of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in November 2006. London and Moscow have clashed mainly over the investigation into the killing: Moscow refused to extradite to Britain a prime suspect, which resulted in a cutback on intelligence cooperation and the mutual expulsion of diplomats.

Recently, Russian authorities raided the offices of British-Russian energy company TNK-BP and accused the British Council, a cultural body partly funded by the British Foreign Ministry, of spying.

When asked whether he believed those accusations to be true, Medvedev replied: "As one of the leaders of this country, I am getting information showing that there is a problem with this," he said. "But this is not very surprising because these types of organizations are traditionally used for the collection of information."

Medvedev, who earlier this month won a landslide victory to succeed Russian President Vladimir Putin, in the interview lauded Russian-British economic cooperation as "magnificent," adding that investments by British firms in Russia in 2007 increased almost four-fold.