Miliband: Russia's president is more liberal than Putin

DAVID Miliband today seized on reports that Russian president Dmitri Medvedev may be pushing for a more liberal agenda than Vladimir Putin.

The Foreign Secretary used his blog to contrast language used by Mr Medvedev and Mr Putin, the Russian prime minister, over the murder of two journalists who worked for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper.

Condemning the failure to capture the killers of Anna Politkovskaya, Mr Miliband says today: "Journalists like her are footsoldiers in the fight for freedom. That another Novaya Gazeta journalist, 25 year-old Anastasia Baburova, was murdered only last month, indicates that the risks remain.

"Women like Politkovskaya and Baburova should never have had to become soldiers in such a literal sense."

He highlighted reports that Mr Medvedev had recently condemned the killings of Baburova and human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov in Moscow in January.

After the death of Kremlin critic Politkovskaya in 2006, Mr Putin played down the significance of her investigative work.

Mr Medvedev demanded recently that a Bill expanding the definition of the crime of treason - that Mr Putin had backed - be revised. One of Mr Medvedev's aides has also spoken of the need for political liberalisation in Russia.

Commenting on the reports, which will fuel speculation of a split between the two Russian leaders, Mr Miliband said: "They suggest we are now seeing a shift of tone from inside the Kremlin. This is welcome." A Russian court last month acquitted three men accused of helping murder Politkovskaya. Her family believes that the killer is still at large.

Mr Miliband added on his blog that a spokesman for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe had branded the fact that the killers of the two journalists had not been brought to justice as a "human rights crisis" in Russia.

Diplomatic relations between Britain and Russia hit a low after the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former agent for the FSB, the successor to the KGB, in London in November 2006. He was poisoned using radioactive Polonium-210.

The Kremlin refused to extradite the main suspect, Andrei Lugovoy, himself a former member of the KGB, which led to tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats from Moscow and London.