MPs told to use World Cup to build bridges with Russia

BRITAIN should use the 2018 football World Cup in Russia to repair ties with Moscow and consider sending ministers and VIPs to attend, a report has said.

The House of Commons foreign affairs select committee says in a report released today that the event should not be boycotted but used to “enhance and repair the wider relationship between the UK and Russia”, despite concerns about human rights, the rule of law, and state-sponsored doping in sport.

The recommendations came in the conclusions of a year-long inquiry into the collapse of relations between Russia and Britain following a series of quarrels including the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko, the expansion of Nato, and Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine and Syria.

The report said attempts to ignore the Kremlin had failed, and that Theresa May was right to advise Donald Trump to “engage but beware” of the Russian government in “a spirit of frankness and honesty”. However, it also said engagement should based on a clear notion of Britain’s strategic interests and should not come at the price of cancelling the sanctions imposed on Russia for its annexation of Crimea and involvement in the war in east Ukraine.

The committee also said the loss of Russian-speaking experts and diplomats since the end of the Cold War had left the UK unable to read Moscow’s intentions, and without a clear strategic vision for its fraught relationship with Vladimir Putin’s government. Crispin Blunt, the chairman of the committee, said: “We’re in a situation where we can’t read [Russia] properly because all the expertise we had from the Soviet period has disappeared.”

The Foreign Office said it had raised investment in Russia-related expertise since the House of Lords produced a report with similar criticisms in 2015.