Putin’s poisonous intentions
Russia is doing potentially irreparable damage to its reputation, writes Leonid Bershidsky
Russian President Vladimir Putin had only played down one poisoning incident this week when another landed in his lap. Putin announced on Wednesday that the two men that Britain accuses of being Russian military intelligence agents sent to poison ex-spy Sergei Skripal in March are “civilians” who have done “nothing special or criminal”.
Then Pyotr Verzilov, an anti-Putin activist and producer of the political punk band Pussy Riot, was hospitalised in Moscow with suspicious symptoms.
Even though poisons, both chemical and biological, have long been used by intelligence services the world over to attack all kinds of enemies — leaders of hostile states, terrorists, defectors, dissidents — what’s happening now with a multitude of proven and suspected Russian cases means the Putin regime has taken the practice beyond any reasonable limits. It is doing more damage to Russia’s reputation and international standing than any individual regime critics or enemies ever could.
Verzilov, who is 30 years old, is the publisher of the anti-regime website Mediazona and a daring action artist; in July he and a group of women, all dressed in police uniforms, rushed on to the field during the football World Cup final in Moscow, before being dragged off.
It’s impossible to say with any certainty yet whether Verzilov has indeed been poisoned. The symptoms, as described by his girlfriend, Veronika Nikulshina, included the loss of his eyesight, ability to walk straight and speak coherently; she suspects foul play. Verzilov was yesterday still in a hospital in grave condition.
Deliberate poisoning was never definitively proven in a number of other prominent cases. Anti-Putin activist Vladimir Kara-Murza — recently a pallbearer at US Senator John McCain’s funeral — came down with the same symptoms twice, in
2015 and 2017: Vomiting and heart palpitations, then a coma. Doctors diagnosed poisoning but could not identify its cause. An unknown compound possibly akin to gelsemium (a rare plant poison), was found in the body of Russian whistleblower Alexander Perepilichny, who died of a heart attack while jogging near London in 2012.
Friends of Badri Patarkatsishvili, who died of a supposed heart attack in Britain in 2008, have long suspected poisoning, too; they’ve been demanding recently that his body be exhumed. (Patarkatsishvili was a business partner of Putin archenemy Boris Berezovsky.) At this point, clear evidence — and a conclusion by a British judge to back it up — exists only in the case of Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian counterintelligence officer poisoned with polonium in London in 2006. Andrey Lugovoi — who, Judge Robert Owen concluded, poisoned Litvinenko — now serves as a Russian Parliament deputy.
In a 2009 article on the use of chemical and biological weapons in assassinations, Shlomo Shpiro, an intelligence expert at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, pointed to deniability as one of the perceived advantages of the technique. “Chemical and biological weapons were used for assassinations because of their invisibility, both in the ease of application to the target and in the difficulty of establishing the cause of death,” Shpiro wrote.
Litvinenko’s killing established
Chemical and biological weapons were used for assassinations because of their invisibility, both in the ease of application to the target and in the difficulty of establishing the cause of death. Shlomo Shpiro
that the current Russian Government has continued the series of poisonings that apparently began in 1957 with the Munich murder of Ukrainian exile Lev Rebet, whom KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky killed with a special device that sprayed vapourised prussic acid (Stashinsky later defected and told the story). Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was poisoned with the sharpened tip of an umbrella in 1978 — an operation its chief planner, KGB General Oleg Kalugin, later wrote about in his memoirs.
The chain continued after the Soviet Union fell apart: In 2003 investigative journalist Yury Schekochikhin died of poisoning, apparently with thallium, a highly toxic heavy metal. The following year, his colleague Anna Politkovskaya survived a poisoning after drinking a cup of tea; she was shot dead in 2006.
One argument for poisonings is plausible deniability, but the Litvinenko case did away with that. And after the Skripal poisonings, government foul play is the default hypothesis; hence the quick, apprehensive reaction to the Verzilov case in the media and on social networks. Although it’s possible that the deviousness of the methods (such as the use of a fake Nina Ricci perfume bottle in the Skripal case) and the prolonged suffering undergone by the known and suspected assassination targets may be meant to instil fear in regime foes, Putin’s opponents are already wary. They know anything can befall them, from arbitrary imprisonment to a hail of bullets like the one that mowed down former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov in 2015.
Poisonings also carry a high risk of failure — victims often survive, or the assassins have second thoughts, as in the 1954 case of KGB officer Nikolai Khokhlov, who was sent to Frankfurt to kill a dissident but instead turned himself over to the authorities. The scandals and failures are, according to Shpiro, the biggest downside to using poison in assassinations. “Chemical and biological weapons do not offer enough substantial benefits in intelligence work to offset the considerable political risk in their use,” Shpiro wrote.
In the West and Israel, poisonings appear to have been abandoned long ago. The British attempt to kill Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser with poisoned chocolates, the US designs to eliminate Cuban leader Fidel Castro by putting thallium-laced cream on his shoes or planting a botulinum toxin in his cigars, a French plot to use thallium against Cameroonian insurgent Felix-Roland Mounie — all these took place in the 1950s and early 1960s. The US hasn’t been known to dabble in such techniques since the 1970s. Israel’s failure to kill Hamas operative Khaled Mashal in Jordan by spraying him with a toxic substance from a soda can dates to 1997.