Has Britain let Putin get away with a string of murders on our soil – to keep Russian money flooding in?

As another Kremlin critic dies in bizarre circumstances, a major investigation asks...

SER GE IS KRIPAL had been warned. He had been a double agent, and in 2010, when the Russians released him and others from jail in a spy-swap for ten Russians captured in America, Vladimir Putin made his intentions brutally clear: ‘Traitors will kick the bucket,’ he announced on state TV. ‘Trust me. These people betrayed their friends, their brothers- in- arms. Whatever they got in exchange for it, those 30 pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them.’

Eight years later, in March 2018, former Soviet military intelligence officer Skripal and his daughter Yulia were fighting for their lives after being poisoned by a deadly Russian nerve agent, Novichok, which had been smeared on the door handle of his home in Salisbury.

It was only the expertise of Government chemical weapons experts at Porton Down a few miles away that saved their lives.

This brazen attempt to perpetrate a statesponsored execution in an English cathedral city provoked worldwide condemnation. The British Government felt it had no option but to act. The then Prime Minister Theresa May announced on the floor of the Commons that it was ‘highly likely’ that Putin was responsible and threw out 23 Russian diplomats from the London embassy. In total, more than 150 Russians were expelled from Western countries.

Such decisive action was welcome, but it was more than a decade too late. The truth is that Putin has been using deadly force to wipe out his enemies from the first days of his presidency in 1999, and nowhere has he done so with greater impunity than in the United Kingdom.

EVEN before the attempt to murder the Skripals, my team at the BuzzFeed News website had uncovered chilling evidence linking Russia to 14 deaths in this country. But in every single case, the British authorities had shut down the investigations and carried on courting the Kremlin.

Today, the evidence against Putin and his gangster friends continues to mount as Russian agents perpetrate a wider campaign of targeted killings around the world. These murders are deliberate, systematic and personally backed by a president determined to suppress all knowledge of his personal connections to organised crime and his suspected participation in terrorist acts – blamed on Chechen rebels – which have killed hundreds of his own citizens.

When 48- year-old James Le Mesurier OBE, the British founder of the White Helmets humanitarian group, fell to his death from an upper storey at his Istanbul home last month, many were left fearing that Putin had eliminated yet another opponent.

The White Helmets, a civilian search-and-rescue group operating in Syria, has been shining an unwelcome l i ght on the devastation caused by Russian air strikes. And Le Mesurier had only recently been accused by Moscow of being a British spy and was taking medication for what his wife described as the intense stress brought about by continuous Kremlin smears.

The Turkish authorities are treating the death as suicide. Le Mesurier, as we shall see, is far from the only figure to have crossed the Russian president and then fallen from a great height.

There are good grounds for suspicion. We have established that Putin has poured resources into a laboratory outside Moscow where armies of government scientists have been working for years to refine nerve agents, deadly germs, obscure carcinogens and radioactive poisons designed to kill assassination targets without leaving a trace.

Russia promised to destroy its 40,000-ton arsenal of chemical and biological weapons in 1993 when it signed up to the Chemical Weapons Convention, but the Kremlin has long been cheating on that promise. Attempts to use the chemicals in battlefield conditions were abandoned after it turned out that airborne chemicals could be blown off course by the weather, making them hopelessly imprecise as weapons of war.

But Western spies studying the Moscow poison factory watched in horror as Putin’s scientists moved towards developing something else instead – a suite of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that could wipe out selected individuals.

The use of elaborate poisons to liquidate enemies of the state had long been a staple of the Russian playbook. The Soviet-era KGB had led the world in the art and science of murder, and its weapons labs churned out such deadly marvels as plague sprays, cyanide bullets, lipstick pistols, and ricin- tipped umbrellas. But the new generat i on of chemicals and diseases developed by Putin’s government is more sophisticated by far.

These substances can be administered orally, in sprays, or in vapours to trigger fast-acting cancers, heart attacks, or multiple organ failure. They allow the specialist hit squads

from the FSB, the KGB’s successor, to eliminate a target while making it look as if the victim had simply succumbed to a sudden illness or died a natural death.

Putin even has an arsenal of psychotropic drugs with which to destabilise his enemies – powerful mood-altering substances designed to plunge targets into enough mental anguish to take their own lives or to make staged suicides look believable.

Why, then, have Britain and the West turned a blind eye while dissenting politicians, journalists, campaigners, defectors, investigators and critics are gunned down, poisoned, hit by cars, thrown out of windows, beaten to death, blown up or thrown into seemingly incurable depressions?

Put simply, it has been the cost of doing business with an economically renascent nuclear power that had a stranglehold on Europe’s energy supply and a super-wealthy class of oligarchs pouring billions into Western economies, particularly that of London and England’s South East.

Successive Western leaders were lulled into the belief that Putin was a man they could do business with – a figure who, with the right coaxing, might finally come in from the cold and integrate the world’s largest country into the warmth of the rules-based liberal world order. It was a catastrophic misjudgment.

PUTIN never really wanted to join the club. He remained what he had always been: a creature of the totalitarian Soviet security state. To his mind, the collapse of the USSR was ‘ the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century’ and he blamed it on the West. It was an outrage to be avenged.

So, having risen through the ranks of the KGB, he arrived at the Kremlin ready to use all the tactics in the Soviet toolkit to restore Russia to its former glory.

While the leaders of the United States and Europe courted him with summits and state visits, handing him the presidency of the G8 and establishing the Nato-Russia Council to foster closer military and political relations, Putin was smiling for the camera, shaking hands, and plotting a silent war on the liberal institutions and alliances upon which the stability of the West depends.

He restored the fearsome power of the Soviet state security apparatus, enriching and empowering the FSB. Anyone who betrayed the motherland, anyone who threatened the absolute power of the Russian state and anyone who knew too much put themselves squarely in the Kremlin’s crosshairs.

And every dead body sent a signal. If you cross Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, there is no safe place for you on Earth.

By 2006, he was sufficiently emboldened to pass new l aws explicitly giving the FSB a licence to kill Russia’s enemies on foreign soil. Since then, his regime’s critics, opponents and traitors have dropped dead in violent or perplexing circumstances in both the United States and Europe – nowhere more than in London, home of an influential group of dissident oligarchs and defected former Russian agents who have made no secret for their hatred of the autocratic Russian leader. They thought they were safe here. They were wrong and paid with their lives.

Some of the names are familiar, particularly Alexander Litvinenko, a defector from the Russian security services who died a horrific death after being poisoned with radioactive polonium in a Central London hotel. Many of the victims, including Litvinenko, had links to Boris Berezovsky, the billionaire mathematician who was once a member of Boris Yeltsin’s government.

BEREZOVSKY became an implacable opponent of Putin and made himself the Kremlin’s No 1 enemy by financing an international campaign of opposition from his new base in the English countryside – as well as financing investigations into Putin’s links to a spate of terrorist attacks against his own people.

One by one, in the years that followed, the lawyers, fixers, dissidents, investigators and businessmen in Berezovsky’s circle dropped dead in strange or suspicious circumstances. One by one, the British authorities closed the cases with no investigation – to the astonishment of their US counterparts – and carried on courting the Kremlin.

Berezovsky himself was found hanging from a shower rail in his Surrey mansion after his security guard had gone to run errands. Like many of Putin’s targets, he had been complaining to those around him that the balance of his mind had been altered, as if by a chemical.

The British Government also disregarded explosive intelligence connecting Russian assassins to a