ACCUSED OF KILLING OF RUSSIAN DISSIDENT WITH RADIOACTIVE POLONIUM

Dmitry Kovtun, a former Russian intelligence agent accused of fatally poisoning a fellow ex-spy with green tea laced with radioactive polonium in the bar of a luxury London hotel, died June 4 in a hospital in Moscow. He was 56.

The cause was complications of COVID-19, said Andrei Lugovoi, a childhood friend of Kovtun’s who is accused of being his accomplice in the murder.

Kovtun and Lugovoi had met their fellow KGB spy, Alexander V. Litvinenko, at the toffee-toned Pine Bar of the

Millennium Hotel on Nov. 1, 2006, to discuss potential investments by British companies in Russia. Three weeks later, Litvinenko died in a London hospital.

Litvinenko had been fired from the Russian Federal Security Service for publicly linking the spy agency to organized crime and for saying that he had been ordered to assassinate Boris Berezovsky, an exiled Russian oligarch and arch-critic of President Vladimir Putin. After being jailed for abuse of office and later acquitted, he sought asylum in Britain in 2000.

In a book published in 2003, Litvinenko also accused the Russian intelligence agency of complicity in apartment bombings in Moscow in 1999 for which the agency had blamed Islamist separatists from Chechnya.

On his deathbed, the 43year-old Litvinenko accused Putin of his assassination, which his son said was caused by “a little, tiny nuclear bomb,” prompting a radiation alert in London.

“You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics claim,” Litvinenko said in a written statement shortly before he died. “You may succeed in silencing one man. But a howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.”

Traces of polonium were found in the Pine Bar, and in hotel rooms and other locations that Kovtun and Lugovoi had occupied.

Weaponizing polonium 210, which is used to produce antistatic materials, would not have been beyond the imagination of the Kremlin’s version of Q, the research and development genius of the James Bond novels and films.

In 1978, Georgi Markov, a

Bulgarian dissident, was said to have been jabbed with a poison-tipped umbrella in London with the connivance of the KGB. The Federal Security Service, the KGB’s successor, was implicated in subsequent poisonings of Putin’s critics.

Litvinenko was investigating the death of Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who was shot to death in her Moscow apartment building the month before he died.

In 2016, after a protracted demand for answers from Litvinenko’s widow, Judge Robert Owen, who had since retired from the British High

Court, delivered an unequivocal finding: “I am sure that Mr. Lugovoy and Mr. Kovtun placed the polonium 210 in the teapot at the Pine Bar on 1 November 2006. I am sure that they did this with the intention of poisoning Mr. Litvinenko.”

Owen also concluded that the evidence “establishes a strong circumstantial case that the Russian State was responsible for Mr. Litvinenko’s death,” and that the security service’s operation was “probably approved” by Putin.

Last year, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia was responsible for the killing.