Twenty years of ruthlessness: how Russia has
silenced Putin’s opponents
From poisonings to shootings to falls from windows and
now possibly plane crashes, Kremlin has been accused of numerous lethal attacks
Pjotr Sauer
Sun 27 Aug
2023 08.00 BST
The form of
the attacks has varied, from underwear daubed with the nerve agent novichok and
polonium-laced tea to more straightforward assassinations by bullet, but
throughout Vladimir Putin’s 23 -year rule, Kremlin critics, journalists and
defected spies have met with similarly ruthless treatment for opposing his
rule.
The fatal
crash of a private jet carrying the Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin two months
after he spearheaded a mutiny against Russia’s top army brass two months ago
appeared to have added a new method to the Kremlin’s extensive assassination
menu.
While the
Kremlin on Friday insisted it was “a complete lie” that it had anything to do
with the jet crash, Prigozhin’s longstanding feud with the military and the
armed uprising he led in June would have given the Russian state ample motive
for revenge.
His death,
along with the deaths of other members of the mercenary group who were onboard,
including Dmitry Utkin, described as its founder or co-founder, also follows a
pattern of action by the Russian state against its critics, including
journalists, human rights activists and former allies who fell out of line.
Below are
some of the more prominent cases of documented killings or attempted killings.
Poisoning
Russian
intelligence officials have turned political poisonings into something of an
art form. Soviet scientists are believed to have worked for decades to develop
colourless and odourless poisons. According to an interview in 1954 with a KGB
operative, the testing of poisons was carried out on living prisoners.
Whereas
poisoning may seem like an archaic way to kill, observers have argued that it
offers the advantage of being a discreet method of assassination. It can be
carried out without immediate detection, allowing the perpetrator to flee the
crime scene and offering the Kremlin plausible deniability.
The two
poisonings most closely associated with Putin both occurred in the UK.
Russia’s
dark methods first came to international attention during the case of Alexander
Litvinenko, a Putin opponent who died of polonium-210 poisoning in London in
2006. Shortly before his death, Litvinenko told journalists the FSB security
service was still operating poison laboratories dating from the Soviet era. A
British inquiry later concluded that Russian agents had killed Litvinenko,
probably with Putin’s approval.
More than a
decade later, Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer
who had become a double agent for the UK, survived a poisoning with a nerve
agent called novichok in Salisbury. Novichok means “newcomer” and refers to a
group of nerve agents developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s to
elude international restrictions on chemical weapons.
Shortly
after the assassination attempt on Skripal, which later led to the death of
another local resident, Dawn Sturgess, who inadvertently sprayed the novichok
on her wrists, Putin labelled the double agent as a “traitor” and a “scumbag”.
In a separate interview not much later, Putin said he could forgive everything
except for “treachery.”
Moscow also
enjoys a long history of going after members of the political opposition.
In August
2020, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny – now jailed – fell ill on a flight
from Siberia to Moscow. Navalny was later flown to Germany for treatment,
where doctors established that he had been poisoned with novichok.
An
investigation by the website Bellingcat identified at least eight FSB
operatives who were allegedly behind Navalny’s poisoning. One of the operatives
allegedly involved later confessed to his role in the plot in a phone call with
the opposition leader.
Russian
security services have also seemingly poisoned less prominent Russians,
including the writer Dmitry Bykov and Pyotr Verzilov, an unofficial
spokesperson for the punk art collective Pussy Riot, who was evacuated to
Germany for treatment shortly after falling ill.
There have
been indications that Russia has continued the practice since Putin’s troops
invaded Ukraine.
Most
recently, an investigative report by the independent news outlet the Insider
alleged that three Russian journalists known for their anti-Kremlin stances
might have been poisoned in foreign countries, including Germany and Georgia.
Shootings
While
poison has emerged as the weapon of choice in Putin’s Russia, several Kremlin
critics have also been shot dead over the years.
In 2006,
Anna Politkovskaya, a Novaya Gazeta journalist who reported on human rights
abuses, was killed outside her flat in Moscow after returning home from the
supermarket. It was Putin’s 54th birthday, and Politkovskaya was 48. Five men
and one former police officer were later convicted of the murder, but those
close to Politkovskaya described them as mere hired guns, carrying out somebody
else’s orders.
Arguably
most brazen was the the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, a prominent opposition
leader, in central Moscow in 2015. Nemtsov was shot four times in the back by
an unknown assailant within view of the Kremlin.
A joint
investigation by journalists from the Insider, the BBC and Bellingcat revealed
that Nemtsov had been shadowed by FSB agents for almost a year before he was
assassinated on a bridge.
While most
political assassinations have occurred on Russian soil, Moscow has also been
accused of shooting its opponents abroad.
Most
notably, in the summer of 2019, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Georgian citizen who
fought against Russia during the second Chechen war in the early 2000s, was
shot twice in the head at close range in Kleiner Tiergarten, a park in central
Berlin.
A German
judge jailed Vadim Krasikov, an alleged FSB agent, for life for what he called
a “painstakingly planned” hit job, saying Russian security services had
provided Krasikov with a false identity, fake passport and the resources to
carry out the assassination.
Krasikov
remains the only suspected FSB agent to have been caught and convicted abroad
for a murder. Moscow has reportedly been trying to involve him in a prisoner
exchange with the west.
Unexplained deaths
There also
have been reports of prominent Russian executives dying under mysterious
circumstances including apparent suicides or falls from great heights.
In 2013,
Boris Berezovsky was found apparently hanged in the bathroom of his Ascot home.
Berezovsky was a former Kremlin insider turned vocal critic of Putin’s
government who went into self-imposed exile in the UK in the early 2000s.
Investigations
and public inquiries into the death have not conclusively established anything
beyond the officially determined cause of suicide, but a German forensic
scientist retained by members of the businessman’s family said his examination
of autopsy photographs had led him to conclude that Berezovsky had not killed
himself.
Many of
Berezovsky’s associates have also died in mysterious circumstances, including
Badri Patarkatsishvili, a Georgian oligarch and business partner, and Nikolai
Glushkov and the Yukos oil founder Yuri Golubev, two associates who were found
dead in London.
Another
former Kremlin insider, Mikhail Lesin, who founded the English-language
television network RT, formerly Russia Today, was discovered dead in a hotel
room in Washington DC in 2015, where he had been invited to attend a
fundraising dinner.
Once a
power player in Putin’s rise to power, Lesin was surprisingly dismissed from
his position in the Kremlin’s influential media apparatus. After a lengthy
investigation, a US autopsy concluded he died as a result of “blunt force
injuries” and not a heart attack, as the Russian state media had reported.
One mystery
that will likely remain unsolved for ever is the death of Kirill Stremousov,
the Russia-installed deputy governor of Kherson province in Urkaine, who
according to Russian officials died in a car crash on the day that Ukrainian
forces liberated the city of Kherson in the autumn of 2022.
Stremousov,
one the most prominent proponents of Russian occupation who was known for his
aggressive statements on social media, publicly suggested in one of his daily
videos that Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, a close friend of
Putin’s, should shoot himself. His murky death was quickly attributed by some
to Russian security services, which needed to get rid of an inconvenient
loudmouth no longer useful to the authorities.
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