Putin and the UK killing field

For many years now I have sought to keep alive the memory of Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Bureau (FSB) who defected to the United Kingdom after he found that his own superior officers were plotting to assassinate Government critics living overseas.

In 2006 Litvinenko became a victim of the plotters, poisoned in London with a radioactive substance so secret that a long-delayed inquiry into his death ruled it could only have come from a Russian State laboratory. 

The head of that inquiry, retired High Court Judge Sir Robert Owen, went further, naming the two men sent to London to perform the murder as Andrey Lugovoy and Dimitri Kovtun.

“I have concluded that that there is a strong probability that when Mr Lugovoy poisoned Mr Litvinenko, he did so under the direction of the FSB. I have further concluded that Mr Kovtun was also acting under FSB direction,” Sir Robert said.

“I have further concluded that the FSB operation to kill Mr Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr Patrushev, then the head of the FSB, and by President Putin.”

This dramatic moment in British legal history is described in a new book From Russia with Blood, by Heidi Blake — but it is one instance in the catalogue of crime that the Russian State, with the express permission of President Vladimir Putin, committed on foreign soil, almost with impunity.

The UK became the main killing field, largely because critics of Putin fled there believing they would be safe. They were wrong, with Blake writing that there may have been as many as 14 instances of suspicious deaths.

Yet almost without exception they were explained away by authorities at the time as suicides or accidents.

Blake writes that it was only the unsuccessful attempt to poison defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia — an attack so blatant and the evidence of Russian involvement so overwhelming — that prompted then Prime Minister, David Cameron to given in to persistent demands by Litvinenko’s supporters for an inquiry into his murder.

Even so, with Sir Robert’s findings part of the public record, Cameron refused to go beyond routine denunciations about an “unacceptable breach of international law”, which Putin contemptuously dismissed.

Cameron’s excuse: “We have to go on having some sort of relationship with [Putin] because we need a solution to the Syria crisis.”  

Three and a half years on from that statement, we are seeing the “solution to the Syria crisis” as Russian planes, in support of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, pound the last rebel hold-out in Idlib, levelling hospitals and orphanages and forcing yet more waves of civilian refugees to flee.

Then there are the attacks on Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea, attempts to manipulate elections in Montenegro and unproved but persistent allegations that Putin interfered in the Western electoral process to support the victory of Donald Trump and secure the Brexit referendum.

Litvinenko was a good man – an honest cop doing his job, which meant he was so dangerous to Putin’s Russia that he had to be hunted down and silenced.

He once described Russia as the ‘Mafia State’ and sadly, despite the rhetoric and occasional wrist slaps from the West, the gangsters in the Kremlin are going to continue their rule for many years to come.