大象传媒

Someone in the Russian Foreign Ministry appears to have decided that the best form of defence is attack.

It called the U.S. spy allegations 'unfounded and unseemly' and it accused the U.S. Justice Department of engaging in Cold War spy stories.

Using unmistakable and characteristic sarcasm, Russia's Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, said the timing of the arrests had been done with 'special elegance'.

Russian politicians are fond of conspiracy theories and some are already concluding that this is all a right-wing plot designed to destabilise Russia-U.S. relations. But Russian security analysts, like Konstanin Eggert, say the really odd thing about this alleged spy ring is that it doesn't appear to have done any real spying.

Konstantin Eggert:
"They haven't managed to gather any kind of significant information or didn't have any kind of sources worth noticing, most stuff they transmitted, if they indeed transmitted it, could have been lifted off the New York Times website."

As for the Kremlin, it is keeping very quiet. President Medvedev doesn't want this peculiar spy scandal to derail his much bigger goal of a new strategic and economic partnership with America.

Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, 大象传媒 News, Moscow