Explainer
The mysterious, violent and unsolved deaths of
Putin’s foes and critics
Alexei Navalny is latest of Putin’s opponents to have
died over course of Russian leader’s nearly 25 years in power
Andrew Roth
Fri 16 Feb
2024 16.38 GMT
Vladimir
Putin’s foes and critics have often met with violent deaths at the very peak of
their conflicts with the Kremlin leader during his nearly quarter-century in
power.
Alexei
Navalny’s death, which many foreign leaders and supporters say is murder, came
after he was banished to an Arctic Circle prison, where he was regularly thrown
in a punishment cell, exposed to the elements and significantly malnourished.
Western officials including the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and
vice-president, Kamala Harris, have directly blamed the Kremlin for his death.
Putin’s
other foes have been targeted in diverse ways: shootings, poisonings and even a
plane crash. Many of the deaths are never solved and remain listed as accidents
and suicides, leaving open the question of just how many of his enemies Putin
has dispatched with over the years.
Alexander Litvinenko
A number of
former members of the Russian intelligence services who defected to the west
have been targeted in poisonings since 2000.
Putin’s
dark methods first came to international attention during the case of Alexander
Litvinenko, a former member of the FSB security services who had become an
opponent of Putin and died of polonium-210 poisoning in London in 2006. His
killers, who both had links to the intelligence services, were accused of
lacing his tea with a radioactive element. Shortly before his death, Litvinenko
told journalists the FSB security service was still operating poison
laboratories dating from the Soviet era. A British inquiry concluded that
Russian agents had killed Litvinenko, probably with Putin’s approval.
In 2018,
agents from the Russian GRU military intelligence agency dispatched to the city
of Salisbury daubed a novichok nerve agent on the doorknob of a house belonging
to Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer who had been
convicted on treason charges and later exchanged with the west. Skripal and his
daughter, Yulia, were nearly killed in the attack. Dawn Sturgess, who lived in
Salisbury and had no connection with the Skripals, died when she was exposed to
the nerve agent.
Yevgeny Prigozhin
The former
head of the Wagner paramilitary group was on poor terms with Putin when he
arrived in Moscow in August last year. He was there for talks with Putin after
an aborted mutiny that saw his mercenaries seize the city of Rostov and march
toward Moscow.
He appeared
to have negotiated a truce with the Kremlin, agreeing to evacuate his troops to
Belarus and focus on the group’s activities outside Ukraine. But an explosion
aboard his Embraer Legacy 600 business jet sent the plane spiralling to the
ground, killing Prigozhin, the field commander Dmitry Utkin and eight others on
board.
Putin then
appeared to eulogise the warlord, saying: “I have known Prigozhin for a long
time, since the 1990s. He made some serious mistakes in life, but he also
achieved the necessary results for himself but also for the greater good when I
asked him.” Soon after, he signed a decree forcing Prigozhin’s troops to swear
an oath to Russia’s national flag.
Boris Nemtsov
One of the
most brazen killings of a Putin critic was the 2015 shooting of Boris Nemtsov,
an opposition leader who had served as deputy prime minister under Boris
Yeltsin and was seen as a potential successor.
Nemtsov was
shot four times in the back by an unknown assailant within view of the Kremlin.
Five men of Chechen origin were arrested over the attack, but those close to
Nemtsov believed the Kremlin was directly involved.
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. It also showed that some of the same agents were
involved in the poisonings of other top Kremlin critics.
Anna Politkovskaya
The
journalist, who had reported critically of Putin and of the Chechen leader,
Ramzan Kadyrov, was shot in her apartment building in Moscow in 2006.
The Novaya
Gazeta reporter was one of Russia’s most prominent journalists and the killing
had a chilling effect on free media in the country.
Five people
were arrested for the killing, but prosecutors admitted they had never found
who had ordered the attack. Putin called for the killers to be found, but also
said Politkovskaya’s effect on Russian life had been “very minor”.
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.
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, who were found dead in
London.
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