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The common denominator is that political assassinations and assassination attempts in Vladimir Putin’s Russia are never solved.
Although political assassinations are nothing new in Russia, the Putin regime has taken them to a new level.
Trying to neutralize political opponents and “traitors” with chemical weapons and other poisons is unique to Russia’s killing machine.
When former Russian FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko was killed with a radioactive substance in London in 2006, it sparked an international crisis. Russia was considered to have crossed all borders. The suspicions were directed at President Putin personally, who dismissed them with the usual arrogance.
But maybe he still thought the price was too high because it took more than ten years before Russia (as far as we know) dared to attempt a new assassination with an extremely dangerous substance.
Found knocked out on a bench
It was in March 2018 that Sergei Skripal and his daughter Julia, who were visiting from Russia, left their home in Salisbury, southern England, to eat at a nearby pub.
A few hours later, they were found by passersby on a bench. Completely knocked out. At first it was thought that they had overdosed on drugs. But when the samples were analyzed, it turned out to be about the novitjok chemical weapon.
Novitjok is the collective name for several different variants of a neurotoxin that developed in the Soviet Union.
Novitjok A230 was built to work in very cold climates. The above substances were frozen at low temperature.
Novitjok A232 was the main variant intended to replace the VX gas that was banned in an international convention against chemical weapons. It was intended to charge with bombs and spread a cloud of droplets that victims could inhale or absorb through their skin.
Photo: AFP METROPOLITAN POLICE SERVICE
Two Russians are believed to have been involved in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, photographed in Britain in connection with the act.
Analyzed in Sweden
The West managed to identify the substance after a German intelligence operation in Russia managed to obtain a “product sample” in 1998. According to Reuters, the sample must have been analyzed in Sweden. Since then, some NATO countries have produced small amounts to try to develop antidotes.
Novitjok A234 was the variant found on the bodies of the Skripal couple and in rows of objects with which they had been in contact. Apart from liquid, A234 can also be manufactured as a gel but also as a fine powder. Therefore, it is the substance of the novitjok family most suitable for intoxicating people.
Police were forced to search long before discovering that the nerve agent had been applied to the door handle of Sergei Skripal’s home. A house that he bought with money from the British intelligence service for which he secretly worked. It came to Britain as part of a spy exchange between Russia and the United States. But Putin still saw him as a traitor.
Skripals survived the assassination attempt, but it was several weeks before Julia and then Sergei regained consciousness. They both live under the protection of the British intelligence service and it is not known if they have any lasting poisoning attempts.
Photo: GETTY IMAGES
Person works at the Shikhany defense laboratory in southwestern Russia, where the novitjok poison for attacks is believed to have been produced.
Passed out on the plane
Unlike opposition politician Alexei Navalny, the Skripal couple quickly received skilled care.
Navalny quickly fell ill after boarding a plane in the Siberian city of Tomsk. On board he collapsed due to severe stomach pains and lost consciousness. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, where he was treated at the city hospital, but doctors said they saw no signs of poisoning.
His transfer to a hospital in Berlin was delayed because doctors first claimed that he was too ill to be transported.
Germany claims that the samples analyzed there unequivocally show that he was poisoned by novitjok, but without going into exactly which of the substances of the novitjok family it is.
Navalny stays asleep so the medicine has a chance to heal the body. However, you may have suffered brain damage due to lack of oxygen.
Unlike the Skripal case, no other person appears to have been poisoned by the substance. This suggests that Navalny ingested the poison orally, probably through a cup of tea that he drank at the airport just before takeoff. However, experts contradict this and believe that taking novitjock by mouth would have killed it very quickly.
Photo: Pavel Lebedev / Vkontakte
Image taken from the movie of a passenger, where Alexei Navalny is drinking tea at Tomsk airport. “Good morning Alexei” is written on the picture.
In Salisbury, a police officer who first appeared on the scene married but survived. Four months later, a couple showed the same symptoms of intoxication. The woman died.
I kept the poison in a perfume bottle
It turned out that they found a bottle of perfume from the brand Nina Ricci, the scent is called “Premier jour”, probably in a container. The woman had applied a little to her skin, believing it was actually perfume. Instead, she had apparently found the bottle of poison that the two FSB agents had brought with them to kill Skripal. In order not to risk being found with the nerve agent on them, they had thrown it somewhere and caused the death of a completely innocent person.
It’s hard to know exactly when Vladimir Putin decided to set his own rules of the game when it came to neutralizing political opponents. But it probably happened shortly after he was elected president of Russia in 2000, appointed by Boris Yeltsin to become his crown prince.
Given that Vladimir Putin has a background as a KGB agent, the step was perhaps not so great.
The Russian intelligence service was not directly known for putting their fingers in the middle if there was someone they wanted to get rid of. Even if it was people from abroad.
But after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the climate of international cooperation became completely different. Nobody felt threatened by their neighbor anymore. The struggle between communism in Eastern Europe and Russia and the western liberal system was over. The West won and communism lost.
I wanted to restore the great power
But in Putin’s eyes, Russia was humiliated. He wanted to restore great power and for that he needed to take full control of Russia. About the media, the courts and everything that could prevent him from reaching his goal.
In 2005, Putin issued the classic statement that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical disaster of all time.”
Soon after, people who were political opponents of Putin or who could be seen as traitors to their country began to fall by the wayside.
Alexander Litvinenko was also a former FSB (successor to the KGB) agent, but he made the mistake of openly criticizing Putin for doing nothing about the widespread corruption in the FSB and the Kremlin. Criticism forced him into exile in London.
But if he thought he was safe there, he was very wrong.
Painful and prolonged fight to the death
In 2006, he was visited by two FSB officers who flavored his tea with the radioactive substance polonium. Litvinenko’s fight to the death was painful and protracted, but on his deathbed he accused Putin of ordering his assassination. Something that also established a British investigation much later.
The oligarch Boris Bereskovsky was a former Putin ally who was also forced to flee to London. He was subjected to repeated assassination attempts. When they found him hanged in 2013, many assumed he had been murdered. It could never be determined if it was suicide or murder
Anna Politkovskaya was perhaps the journalist who most criticized the Putin regime and the war in Chechnya. She reported in the few remaining independent Russian media, but was also known internationally. In 2004, her tea was poisoned on a flight to the Caucasus. She survived. But when a hitman opened fire on her door in Moscow in 2006, there was no rescue.
Putin an accomplice
A few years later, the journalist Anastasia Baburova, who often worked with Politkovskaya, was assassinated. She was shot by the same perpetrators who killed human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov when she tried to help him.
Former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov was one of Putin’s leading critics and a man who uncovered facts about how Putin personally came to power. He was shot in the back in 2015 with multiple shots when he walked outside the Kremlin walls late one night.
The list could be made much longer.
In some cases, the person holding the gun has been revealed, but has stayed there. The real culprits who ordered the killings have continued to move in the shadows.
Although President Putin cannot be singled out for ordering the killings, he is complicit in creating an atmosphere in Russia where it is okay to murder opposition figures and “traitors” without ever answering the real culprits.
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