MOSCOW — If you're looking for Russia's most notorious international outlaw, try his new office in parliament.
Andrei Lugovoy, the prime suspect in the 2006 radioactive poisoning death of a former Russian spy in London, is a celebrated figure these days in the Russian capital. Not only has Moscow brushed aside extradition requests from Britain, this onetime bodyguard has just been elected to the marble halls of the Duma, the lower house of parliament.
Lugovoy says he was framed. But that doesn't stop him from basking in the adoration showered on someone widely seen as a symbol of anti-Western defiance.
"I'd like to personify Russian citizens who, at a difficult moment in their lives, display courage and fortitude," Lugovoy said during a rare interview last week in his Moscow office.
Lugovoy's presence in parliament epitomizes, for observers at home and abroad, the bold us-against-them atmosphere pervading Moscow. The boyish 41-year-old is a thorn in the side of the British government, which has unsuccessfully lobbied Russia to turn him over to stand trial in the killing of Alexander Litvinenko.
With his sporty carriage and bashful grin, the tow-headed Lugovoy doesn't look like the embodiment of neo-Soviet tensions between Russia and the West. But when he talks, he sounds the part.
He refers to the fall of the Soviet Union as a blunder. He says he wants Russia's military might to return to the sweep and power of its Soviet heyday. He accuses U.S. intelligence agencies of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks "because they needed to create a certain mood."
"I don't agree that the Cold War is back. It has never ended," he said. "Any normal Russian person in the 1990s didn't see anything from the West except insults and humiliation."
So is this payback time? Lugovoy laughed a little, then spoke deliberately.
"I don't agree with this biblical saying that if they hit you on one cheek you should turn the other cheek," he said. "If they hit you on one cheek, you hit them back with a fist."
Implicit in Lugovoy's popularity, in the public's enthusiastic reaction to his name, is the underlying assumption that he killed Litvinenko. Not that anybody ever comes out and calls him a killer. But that idea hangs over him: Lugovoy is suspected of spiking the former spy's tea with radioactive polonium-210, traces of which turned up in hotel rooms, restaurants and airplanes he was in during his trip to London.
