Britain-Russia ties may remain strained for long time: expert

The diplomatic stand-off between Britain and Russia will have profound and long lasting consequences, a British academic expert in intelligence and security said Monday.

Prof. Anthony Glees, director of the Center for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham, said the row provoked by a nerve-agent attack in the southern England city of Salisbury on a former Russian agent and his daughter was an extremely serious matter. Glees described it as the worst collapse in relations between the two countries since the cold war.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has not only pointed a finger of blame at Russia, but claimed that Britain has evidence from within the last decade that Russia has been "creating and stockpiling" the Novichok nerve agent used in the Salisbury attack.

Vladimir Chizhov, Russia's ambassador to the European Union, has claimed the nerve agent used in the attack was manufactured in British government's own top-secret defense laboratory at Porton Down, just a few kilometers away from Salisbury.

Moscow has long insisted that the production of chemical agents stopped in 1992 and that its stockpile of material was completely destroyed by 2017.

With each country expelling 23 diplomats in the usual tradition of tit-for-tat reactions, a waiting game is now under way into what happens next, and who makes the next move.

Britain's Foreign Office says it has no disagreement with the people of Russia and so far said it is not in the national interest to break off all dialogue with Russia. But the department has insisted the onus remains on the Russian state to account for their actions and to comply with their international obligations.

Glees told Xinhua: "Neither the UK nor Russia can have any interest in armed conflict so a channel of communication must stay open. But if Russia retaliates in the next days or weeks for example with a cyber attack, that will ramp things up. Russia sees the UK as weakened and divided due to Brexit. We are very vulnerable at the moment. That is why this is potentially a big crisis."

Glees said relations may not be cordial for a long time to come.

A team of inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), based at The Hague, arrived Monday will collect nerve agent samples used in the attack and send them for independent testing. It could take two weeks for results of the testing to emerge.

In The Guardian newspaper, the leader of Britain's main opposition Labor Party Jeremy Corbyn warned: "Britain needs to hold the perpetrators to account. Yet this is not a time for hasty judgments that could lead to a new cold war."

Corbyn added: "The continuing fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the virtual collapse of the Russian state in the 1990s must be addressed through international law and diplomacy if we are to reverse the drift to conflict."

Meanwhile, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, who was Britain's ambassador to Russia during critical years of the Cold War, has criticized senior British government ministers of "shooting their mouths off" amid the deepest crisis in relations with Moscow since the end of the Cold War.

Braithwaite told The Independent newspaper in London: "Whether you like Russia or not, it is a big country, which now has rather a lot of influence in the world -- whether you like it or not."

He said it seemed to him that some British politicians, including the Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson, had come out too early saying things that are much too wild.

Briathwaite described the current diplomatic crisis between Britain and Russia as a highly emotional confrontation he urged caution about referring to it as a new "Cold War".