PM in 'frank' talks with Russia

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UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has held his first face-to-face meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the G8 summit in Toyako, Japan.

It follows a row over Moscow's refusal to extradite a man accused of killing ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.

Mr Brown said he had "raised all difficult issues" during the meeting and that he and Mr Medvedev had found "common ground" on several issues.

A Kremlin official said the talks had been "extremely frank".

The meeting came in the wake of appeals by Britain for Russia to hand over businessman Andrei Lugovoi, whom UK investigators suspect of murdering Mr Litvinenko in London.

Mr Litvinenko, a fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin, died of poisoning from polonium-210 on 23 November 2006.

Mr Lugovoi, a former KGB agent, has always maintained his innocence.

'Extremely frank'

The Kremlin official said the meeting between Mr Brown and Mr Medvedev "contained some sharp exchanges", but he refused to comment on whether the two leaders had discussed the fall-out from the Litvinenko row.

He said controversy over the British Council, whose offices had been ordered to close in Russia in the wake of the argument, were raised, along with the current dispute over the energy joint venture, BP-TNK.

He said the Russian view was that the talks had tried to focus on finding a way to get back to good relations.

More than half the discussion had been devoted to points of common interest, like how to combat global economic problems, rather than points of tension, he said.

Speaking to journalists at the G8 summit, Mr Brown said both countries wanted progress on the Middle East Peace Process and had a shared desire not to see Iran go down the road of developing nuclear weapons.

He said an earlier multilateral meeting had indicated a "growing support for sanctions to be stepped on" to Tehran over the nuclear issue and a "common interest" in tackling the "illegitimate regime" in Zimbabwe.