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MOSCOW. – Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday urged “common sense” to prevail in the spy poisoning crisis as London and Moscow faced off in a tense meeting at the world’s chemical weapons watchdog.

Putin’s plea came as Moscow expelled a Hungarian diplomat in a tit-for-tat move, just the latest escalation of tensions between Russia and the West since the nerve agent attack on a former Russian double agent a month ago.

“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 said after summit talks in Ankara.

But at the start of a meeting of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), London slammed as “perverse” a Russian proposal for a joint probe into the poisoning of ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

“We will not agree to Russia’s demand to conduct a joint investigation into the attack in Salisbury because the UK – supported by many other countries – has assessed that it is highly likely that the Russian state is responsible for this attack, and that there is no plausible alternative explanation,” British chemical arms expert John Foggo told the OPCW executive council in The Hague.

OPCW experts have already taken samples at the site of the March 4 attack in Salisbury, and they are being analysed in its labs in The Hague, as well as in four other certified labor- atories.

Britain has said the Skripals and a British police officer were exposed to a Soviet-designed nerve agent called Novichok.

OPCW chief Ahmet Uzumcu told the meeting he expected the results by his team “by early next week”.

“The OPCW team worked independently and is not involved in the national investigation by the UK authorities,” he in- sisted.

The crisis has sent the long-difficult relations between Russia and the West plummeting to new lows. Both sides have already expelled scores of diplomats.

Britain has also suspended high-level diplomatic contact with Moscow.

Russian foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin warned yesterday in a speech in Moscow that both sides must avoid tensions escalating to the dangerous levels of the Cold War.

And he said that accusations of Moscow engineering the attack were a “grotesque provocation . . . crudely concocted by the British and American security ser- vices”.

At a closed-door OPCW meeting convened at Moscow’s request, Russia insisted it was ready to cooperate. – AFP