Murder most horrid
In 2006 Alexander Litvinenko, former officer of the Russian secret police and defector to the West, was murdered in London by two Russian thugs, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun. The murder weapon made the case sensational news.
Lugovoi and Kovtun had rendezvoused with Litvinenko in a bar and stirred some highly radioactive polonium-210 into his green tea. Before he died, Litvinenko spent three weeks wasting away in a London hospital as images of his emaciated body went around the world.
Doctors were baffled and scientists took their time diagnosing the murder weapon. Polonium-210 cannot be detected by a Geiger counter the way Uranium can.
Why was Litvinenko murdered? Because in Russia he had proposed exposing one of the chief oligarchs and he was aware of Vladimir Putin’s Mafia links. After the fall of communism there had been brief hope for a democratic Russia, but this rapidly gave way to the kleptocracy that Putin still controls.
The best evidence suggests that Lugovoi and Kovtun, both of whom now walk free in Russia, were commissioned to do the job by Putin’s inner circle.
Luke Harding is the Guardian‘s former Moscow correspondent. He is now persona non grata in Russia because of his critical stories.
Harding frames the Litvinenko case as a crime story, following the transport of the poison across London, profiling the murderers and tracing the evidence for official Russian involvement.
He lambasts British security services for being so lax in both their surveillance of the murderers and in allowing similar extra-territorial Russian murders to be carried out on British soil. Possibly the Tory party’s cuddling up to Russian billionaires (who now own much London real estate) has something to do with this.
Harding sees Litvinenko’s murder as the beginning of Putin’s intended destabilisation of the West.
The murder preceded the Russian annexation of the Crimea (in March 2014); the ethnic Russian uprising that Putin arms and funds in eastern Ukraine; attempts to rally and control Russian minorities on Balkan states; and Putin’s current ‘‘forward policy’’ in Syria.
What lesson can be taken from this? There may be some tender souls who still do not understand, but the essential ideology of Russia has always been national chauvinism. It makes little difference if it is tsarist, communist or Putin-esque.
The West’s Cold War with Russia is still in progress, but much of the West doesn’t know it.
Like Stalin before him, Putin is not concerned if it is known that his hitmen can reach defectors and dissenters in other countries. The aim is fear. If this deters people from defecting or dissenting, then so much the better.