Hardly had the enthusiastic voices of Russian TV-heralds ceased over the incredibly successful visit of Dmitri Medvedev to the USA, as U.S. counterintelligence started “resetting” bilateral relations.

Last Saturday and Sunday special FBI agents detained 10 individuals suspected of working on Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (FIS). The peculiarity of the situation is that all those arrested are illegal agents who arrived in the United States under fake documents after a course of training at the FIS. The official report of the Department of Justice contains exactly this version.

If this version is correct, then we can speak about the ultimate failure of modern Russian intelligence service.

However, some circumstances have caused skeptics to doubt the sincerity of the FBI version. In particular, there are assumption that the bureau has detained not “Russian spies”, but ordinary "Russian fraudsters", who make a living by laundering money and other wheeler-dealer finance.

Whether it is really so, the parties of the “spy scandal” will clarify themselves. However, this “Bondiana” looks extremely intriguing against the background of the U.S. tour of Dmitri Antolievich. Western media did not fail to notice that the FBI had been investigating the case for at least seven years, while the lightening operation aimed to arrest the “spies” was being prepared while American and Russian leaders were having dinner in one of Arlington eateries. Moreover, three out of ten arrestees were detained exactly in Arlington, where Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev enjoyed the hamburgers and shared French fries.

In this connection, there arose the assumption that the scandal was initiated by the “Republican” opposition, who are dissatisfied with Barack Obama and his foreign- policy arrangements. In this case, according to Deputy Director of the Institute of the USA and Canada V. Kremeniuk, the goal has been achieved. “This incident will negatively affect present-day relations, and I think that some things will either be blocked, or simply condemned to oblivion,” he said in an interview with RIA “Novosti”. “It is a hard knock on Obama and his arrangements with Medvedev. Now Obama will find himself in a position when he would have to get it sorted somehow, make excuses and say that he understands everything, but we have to deal with the aftermath of the “Cold War”.

Meanwhile, sources in the U.S. “security” circles, called the arrested “spies” only “the tip of the iceberg”. “Reset” can get a continuation.

Dmitri Perminov