Putin urges ‘common sense’ to prevail in spy row

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday said that “common sense” must prevail in the row with the West over an ex-spy whose poisoning in Britain has been blamed on Moscow.

“What we expect is that common sense will in the end prevail and there will not be this damage in international relations that we have seen recently,” Putin told reporters in Ankara after talks on Syria.

He said common sense should not just apply to the dispute over the Skripal attack “but also all other aspects of international relations”.

“We need to act within the framework of healthy political processes that are based on the fundamental norms of international law,” said Putin, who attended a three-way summit in Ankara with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iran’s Hassan Rouhani.

“Then the situation in the world will become more predictable and stable.”

Putin’s comments came as Russia and Britain traded accusations at a tense meeting of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) over the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal with a nerve agent in England.

Britain and its Western allies have blamed Moscow for the attack on Skripal, a Russian former double agent who has lived in Britain since a spy swap in 2010, but the Kremlin has vehemently denied responsibility.