Litvinenko murder: Moscow shrugs off London’s accusations against Putin
The inquest ordered by the British government corroborated accusations against former Russian secret agent Lugovoi and his partner Kovtun, and demonstrated that radioactive polonium was used in killing the former Russian spy, turned Kremlin critic. Moscow dismisses the findings, describing the inquest as “politicised”, and promising repercussions on bilateral relations. So far Putin has not spoken on the matter, but the (hi)story of Russia’ poison factory goes back a long way.
Moscow (AsiaNews) – Tensions are rising between London and Moscow after a British judge released a report into the assassination of former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko, who died from poisoning in November 2006, in London.
In the document, Judge Robert Owen, a High Court judge acting as the coroner, said that "maybe" the Russian state was behind the murder, that the evidence clearly points to the Russian state in the death of Litvinenko, who was poisoned with polonium-210, a highly toxic radioactive substance.
The judge goes further. “Taking full account of all the evidence and analysis available to me, I find that the FSB operation to kill Mr Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr Patrushev and also by President Putin,” the report says.
This reinforces the belief that the perpetrators of the murder were former KGB agent Andrei Lugovoi, now a Member of Russia’s Duma, and businessman Dmitry Kovtun, who laced Litvinenko’s tea with the lethal substance in their last meeting, three weeks before of his death.
Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun quickly dismissed the allegations as "nonsense", claiming their innocence. Russian authorities have always refused to extradite them, noting that the Russian constitution prevents the extradition of Russian citizens to foreign states.
Moscow’s response
So far, Moscow has dismissed the report. In Russia, some pro-government TV sarcastically dubbed the judge "Mr. Maybe", because the report is full of suppositions and no hard facts. When it was set up, the inquest’s mandate was to find facts but lay no charges.
A Putin spokesman called the report a "quasi-investigation”. Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the inquest was “politicised”, a farce pledging that Russia would study the 300-page document to provide a detailed answer, hinting at consequences to bilateral relations.
For Russian authorities, Great Britain is to blame for the tensions for launching the inquest itself in July 2014 in the middle of the Ukrainian crisis, for purely political reasons to smear Russian leaders.
Putin-Litvinenko, a highly personal row
"The history between the two men dated back to their (only) meeting in 1998, at a time when Mr Putin was the newly appointed head of the FSB* and Mr Berezovsky and Mr Litvinenko still hoped that he might implement a programme of reform," Owen writes in the report.
After obtaining asylum in Britain in 2000, Litvinenko regularly attacked Putin with "highly personal public criticism", including an accusation of paedophilia, AFP reports.
In London, Sasha, as Alexander Litvinenko was known to friends, joined Boris Berezovsky, an anti-Putin oligarch who died under “unexplained” circumstances in March 2013.
In the British capital, he began an investigation into links between the Kremlin and the Russian mafia, about possible connections between the KGB and important figures, like former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, and collaborated with Her Majesty’s secret services whose subject he had become.
In short, for the coroner there was enough evidence to suggest that high officials in the Russian State might want to eliminate their former spy. On his deathbed, Litvinenko wrote a letter in which he openly accused the boss in the Kremlin of being responsible for his murder.
Possible diplomatic percussions
Reacting to the report, Litvinenko's widow, Marina, called «for the imposition of targeted economic sanctions and travel bans against named individuals including Mr Patrushev (former head of Russia's FSB security service) and Mr Putin."
In British media, few believe that the Cameron government wants to escalate the conflict with a country with which it is working on sensitive issues like negotiations on Syria and the fight against the Islamic State group.
Still, British Prime Minister David Cameron cannot be seen as weak on a national security issues like the Litvinenko affaire. Calling his murder a “state sponsored action” as well as an “absolutely appalling” crime, the British leader pledged to be tough with Moscow.
At present, the British government has frozen the assets of two alleged killers and some observers expect the expulsion of some Russian diplomats.
Among analysts in Moscow though, few believe that the affaire will have any major impact on British Russian relations, which are already at an all-time low.
For some experts, at best, the investigation can be fodder for further anti-Russia talk in international fora such as the Parliament or the European Commission.
As for Putin, he remains an unknown factor since he has not said anything on the matter, and is not likely to let the matter stand as it is.
The poison factory
However, there are no doubts about the substance used to kill agent Sasha or its provenance. Polonium is a rare element, but certain quantities of polonium-210 isotope are produced in a Russian nuclear military facility because the Russian Federation is last country in the world to use it as a trigger or initiator for nuclear weapons, this according to a well-research book** by Italian journalist and Russia expert Francesca Mereu.
The substance can only be produced in highly specialised laboratories by poison experts, which the Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia have often used. Indeed, in a book about his experiences with Soviet intelligence (1984-1992), a former KGB agent, Alexander Kouzminov talks about the biological unit in SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki), the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, whose poison lab, set up in 1921 before Lenin’s death, was known in Soviet times as Laboratory 12 or the Kamera (chamber).
Under Stalin, the Kamera was located near the Lubyanka and employed the best Soviet chemists, often developing powerful and sophisticated poisons to kill victims without raising suspicion.
The Kamera stopped its activities in the 1990s for lack of funding, but the unit was back in business the following decade. Like in the Litvinenko case, the poisoning in 2004 of Viktor Yushchenko, who was running for president of Ukraine, bears the hallmark of the Kamera.
According to Mereu, poison produced by Laboratory 12 is also suspected in the deaths of Yuri Shchekochikhin, a Russian journalist and lawmaker, and that of many others who died during the Putin era. In her view, since he came to power poisoning has become once again a privileged tool to deal with undesirables.
* FSB stands for the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (Federal'naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii), the successor agency to the Soviet Union’s Committee of State Security (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, or KGB).
** Putin: The Invention of a Democratic Dictatorship. The book was originally published in Italian: L’AMICO PUTIN. L’invenzione della dittatura democratica. Aliberti Editore, Reggio Emilia, June 2011.
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