The Russia Conundrum

Under Vladimir Putin, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of political poisonings. Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist who wrote critically of Putin’s activities in Chechnya, was unsuccessfully poisoned before she was eventually shot in 2006. The anti-Kremlin Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko was fed deadly dioxin at a dinner in 2004 with security officials loyal to Moscow, but survived with disfiguring injuries. In 2003, Yuri Shchekochikhin, a vocal opposition member of the Russian Duma, died from the effects of unexplained radiation exposure. In 2004, Roman Tsepov, a former bodyguard to the St Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak and, briefly, to Vladimir Putin, was poisoned with an unidentified substance. An official investigation declared the cause of death unproven, but sources within the investigative team suggested symptoms compatible with radiation poisoning. And in August 2020, the Russian opposition activist, Alexei Navalny, spent two and a half weeks in a coma after being poisoned with a new type of Novichok while returning from Siberia to Moscow. Investigations uncovered the identities of the FSB agents who had smeared the deadly nerve agent on Navalny’s clothes, but the Russian authorities refused to bring criminal proceedings against them, declaring that there was no evidence of a crime having been committed.

A common factor in all of these cases has been the immense suffering the poison inflicts on its victims. Polonium, for instance, rots and destroys the human body from within, eating up the internal organs with no way to alleviate its terrible, inexorable torture. The evidence suggests that the Kremlin’s aim is not just to kill, but to kill with such inhuman cruelty that it will intimidate and terrify its enemies and potential future enemies worldwide – an exemplary killing that will not allow anyone to forget it and will not allow anyone to feel safe, wherever they are.

The Litvinenko operation was aimed not just at Litvinenko himself, but also at his boss, the exiled anti-Putin oligarch, Boris Berezovsky. The FSB’s assassin, Andrei Lugovoy, spent the evening before the murder sitting in Berezovsky’s office, spreading polonium on to his furniture, making a show of Berezovsky’s vulnerability, only to spare him and kill his lieutenant. Putin was saying, ‘We could have killed you, but we didn’t; you are at our mercy…’

State-run Russian television offered the usual tongue-in-cheek denial – ‘It wasn’t the Kremlin who did this, because it had nothing to gain from killing Litvinenko’ – before identifying the real target of the exercise. ‘If the Kremlin wanted to exterminate its opponents, think about it…,’ said the smiling presenter. ‘Stalin had Trotsky knocked off, not Trotsky’s chauffeur. Not Trotsky’s dog … Litvinenko isn’t Trotsky. I’m sorry, but Litvinenko is Trotsky’s dog!’ If the FSB had murdered ‘Trotsky’s dog’, they had murdered him at his master’s heel. The message was clear: we know this is a Western country, we know you think you are protected; but we have the power and you are not safe.

In Stalinist times, the communist leadership despatched teams of assassins around the globe to hunt down ‘traitors to the Motherland’. During the brief window of East–West rapprochement under Boris Yeltsin, that sort of thinking was abandoned, but Vladimir Putin has brought it back. A law passed in July 2006 gave the security forces the explicit right to kill enemies of the state at home or abroad. ‘Special operations divisions of the Federal Security Service [FSB],’ states article 9.1 of Federal Law No. 153-FZ, ‘may be deployed, by decision of the President of the Russian Federation, against terrorists … located outside the territory of the Russian Federation in order to eliminate a threat to the security of the Russian Federation.’ Specifically mentioned as legitimate targets are people, such as Boris Berezovsky, who call for political change in Russia, described in legal jargon as ‘individuals … aiming to forcibly change the constitutional system of the Russian Federation’. It’s a formula that allows the FSB wide discretion, and it has been widely deployed. FSB commanders no longer need to request permission to kill; the law is in place and no one is going to punish them.

Speaking about the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, Putin laughed at calls for an investigation. ‘Who needs him [Navalny]?’ he sneered. ‘If somebody had wanted to poison him, they would finish him off.’