Last week, the British Government published the long-awaited findings of its inquiry into the 2006 hit on ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. No doubt the most sensational finding is that Russian President Vladimir Putin had to have ordered FSB (formerly KGB) agents to execute it:
Mr. Putin is likely to have signed off the poisoning of Mr. Litvinenko with polonium-210 in part due to personal ‘antagonism’ between the pair, it said.
Home Secretary Theresa May said his murder was a ‘blatant and unacceptable’ breach of international law.
(BBC, January 21, 2016)
But there’s something to be said for the very British way Putin’s hitmen, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovturn, killed Litvinenko: they invited him to afternoon tea, and then laced his cuppa with poison.
Never mind its copycat nature. After all, any student of the deadly art of spy craft had to have recognized similarities with the 1978 hit on Bulgarian defector Geogi Markov.
In that case, the KGB and Bulgarian secret police conspired to have a hitman use a poison-tipped umbrella to pin prick Markov while he waiting for a bus on Waterloo Bridge. Clearly, only poisoning a target at afternoon tea could be more British than that. But I digress.
Sir Robert Owen, chairman of the Inquiry, published the findings in a report on January 21. Unsurprisingly, the outrage it incited in Britain was matched by the contempt it incited in Russia.
As it happened, I telegraphed this outrage and contempt, respectively, almost ten years ago. Here, in part, is what I wrote in “Putin Probably Ordered the Hit. But No One Will Do Anything about It,” November 28, 2006.
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The prevailing suspicion is that Putin targeted Litvinenko because he was becoming too credible in his criticisms of the Kremlin. Litvinenko fled for his life in 2000 after accusing the FSB of killing over 300 Russians in 1999 in a Machiavellian scheme to frame and discredit Chechen rebels.
Then he began publishing the findings of his high-profile investigation into what many suspect was a Putin-ordered hit on journalist Anna Politkovskaya last month. She herself was publishing too many inconvenient truths about that ‘Chechen conspiracy.’ Putin had had enough of them both…
Nonetheless, with all due respect to Scotland Yard and Interpol, no matter how probative the circumstantial evidence of Putin’s guilt, neither he nor his putative hitmen will ever be held to account for this murder. And everyone knows it.
I coined the term “Putinization” to describe the way Putin has been ruling Russia for years more like a criminal enterprise than a democratic country…
Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Putin would order the assassination of a spy who, for all intents and purposes, he considered not only an insufferable critic but also a traitor. Nor should it surprise anyone if/when this case results in terminal frustration for Litvinenko’s loved ones (namely his avenging wife and son) and patented futility for British authorities.
However, if one appreciates that Putin seems determined to emulate former Russian strongman Joseph Stalin, his ordering the assassination of these two journalists would seem relatively benign. After all, Stalin ordered the assassination of at least one million Russians (at home and abroad) and threw another 18 million in the Gulag for political offenses.
Of course, it’s in the nature of totalitarian leaders like Stalin and Putin to manage their public image the way they manage sycophantic bureaucrats. Therefore, it should also come as no surprise that Putin would do all he could to intimidate critics he cannot kill.
In this regard, here is how he warned the British and others against drawing reasonable conclusions about his involvement in Litvinenko’s murder:
I hope the British authorities won’t fuel groundless political scandals… It is a great pity that even such tragic things as human death are used for political provocations. As I know, the medical certificate of British doctors does not indicate that he died a violent death. It does not say that. Hence there is no reason for such talk at all.
(New York Times, November 25, 2006)
His perversely proud reference to the insidious rather than violent method his assassins used to kill Litvinenko speaks volumes, even if unwittingly. Alas, I suspect Putin will feel obliged to say no more.
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But if ever there were an assassination worthy of “such talk,” it happened last year. That’s when Putin allegedly ordered the most brazen hit of his rule. And the four bullets in the back of this target made it a very violent death indeed.
Boris Nemtsov, a leading opponent and former deputy prime minister was gunned down in Moscow just a few hours after a radio interview in which he denounced Vladimir Putin’s ‘mad, aggressive’ policies…
Nemtsov, 55, was shot in the shadow of the Kremlin shortly before midnight on Friday in a murder that bore all the hallmarks of a contract killing.
(London Telegraph, February 28, 2015)
I duly lamented in “Fated Assassination of Russian Opposition Leader Boris Nemtsov,” March 1, 2015.
On the other hand, this Inquiry report also found that a salacious “personal antagonism” motivated Putin to kill Litvinenko. Here is how the London Daily Mail highlighted this angle on January 22:
Alexander Litvinenko claimed that Vladimir Putin had been caught on camera having sex with young boys…
Litvinenko made the accusation after the president was pictured kissing the stomach of a five-year-old boy during a walkabout in the Kremlin in June 2006…
The inquiry report describes how the dissident claimed Mr. Putin was a ‘paedophile’.
Mind you, I remember thinking when I saw that picture that, even though strange, there was nothing sexual about it. And it’s not as if Litvinenko had not already given Putin more than enough reasons to kill him.
But I can see how this accusation could have been the triggering event, perverting as it did the macho, he-man image Putin always cultivated. Sure enough, Litvinenko was dead within five months of making it.
All the same, nothing in this report challenges what I wrote 10 years ago. What’s more, despite the sensational reporting and expressions of outrage it incited, the British government still seems loath to even attempt to hold Putin to account. Hell, it did all it could to prevent the Inquiry in the first place.
Signs are the British state may not be keen at this moment to further escalate tensions with Russia, particularly because of Moscow’s role in the Middle East and the Syria crisis.
(BBC, January 21, 2016)
The aforementioned home secretary betrayed the government’s intent in this respect. Specifically, she made a parliamentary show of freezing the nominal assets of the alleged assassins, while uttering nary a word about Putin, the man who ordered the assassination.
Granted, anyone who has seen any James Bond film knows that the British themselves are avid practitioners of the deadly art of spy craft. I don’t mean to make light of Litvinenko’s death. But it would not surprise me to learn that British leaders have ordered similar assassinations abroad, and that the host government did even less about it.
To be sure, the findings in this report are as devastating as they are unimpeachable. Yet Putin was right. There was no reason for such talk of legal consequences, especially given that even I knew from the outset that it would amount to sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Related commentaries:
Putin ordered hit…
Hit on Boris Nemtsov…