Notes on the Upcoming Moscow Protest

A reader in contact with the Oborona opposition group reports that, not surprisingly, the proposed mid-April protest march in Moscow (on the main Pushkinskaya Square) by the “Other Russia” coalition has been banned by the Kremlin. The reader reports:

According to the authorities, a request for a different action planned for the same place and the same time was submitted “a minute before” the organizers of the march submitted theirs. Of course, the organizer of the “strike breaker” action was United Russia’s Young Guard. However, Other Russia’s activists were at that place for the whole morning and they saw no other people submitting their requests. Nor did the TV journalists who filmed the process of submitting the request for the march. So it seems that the request is fake. The administration suggests that the march should take place near V.V.C. (VDNKh) far from city center instead of Pushkinskaya square. The organizers will surely reject this proposal.

The reader also offers the following comments from Oborona about the protest, following up on the Nizhny Novgorod and St. Petersburg events recent documented on LR (a second march in St. Petersburg may occur in mid-April as well):

A statement about the march was submitted to the Moscow administration on Friday – the earliest day allowed for this. Legally, we don’t need to get any permissions nor does the government have a right to ban a rally (if the statement was prepared and submitted correctly).

However, some Moscow officials have already claimed that they are not going to “let Nizhny Novgorod events happen in Moscow”. It means that they will probably try to ban the march, even illegally. Anyway, we’ll see it in a few days, I suppose.

The authorities are trying to prevent the march as usual: stickers inviting people to the march are removed, fake stickers have been printed and are distributed instead. These fake ones are made in the same colors and fonts but they say,” Russia is eternal and non-dividable. There isn’t and won’t be the ‘Other Russia'”.

According to the media Moscowadministration has even arranged a gay parade for 14 April and it will probably have the same route as the march. If this information is true, we’ll have to expect lots of LGBT people (fake or real) coming to the march and showing off. So the authorities will try to pretent that the march is connected with the LGBT movements. Ironically, just a year ago Moscow mayor Luzhkov claimed there would never be a gay parade in Moscow but now he decided ‘the discontent’ a bigger evil.

The United Russia’s youth union (Young Guard – Molodaya Gvardia) plans its own rally in for 14 April (but in a different place) and they claim they’ll bring 15,000 people there. They invite people in online forums for 200 roubles (approx. $7).

On 31 March there was a Communist rally in Moscow. It was quite small but lots of riot police was brought in and we saw a new anti-riot vehicle. It looks like a general repetition before the march.

There is going to be an Imperial March on 8 April. It is organized by a pro-Kremlin right-wing organization Eurasian Youth Union (ESM) and it’s directed against the “orangist opposition” and the West. Even United Russia’s youth union (Young Guard – Molodaya Gvardia) is going to join.

The reader offers some additional observations:

1. President’s Administration approaches all the parties to sign an “anti-extremist” agreement. It says that the parties will not take part in any “extremist” activities nor will they support “extremists” at the elections. The exact text of the statement is kept secret, even from those who are going to sign it. United Russia (Spravedlivaya Rossia) and Yabloko have already agreed to sign it.

2. Not directly connected with the march but also an interesting event. The SPS federal board has effectively dismissed party’s Moscow branch and suspended its board. This happened because Moscow was an opposition enclave in SPS, had too anti-Putin position and even decided to join the march (despite the federal party’s decision to ignore it). So it looks like the SPS is finally becoming a pro-Putin party.

3. There are rumors that some officials from Putin’s Administration offered $50,000 to an LGBT activist for organizing a gay parade during the March of Discontent.

The Moscow Times reports:

The Other Russia, a coalition of political opposition groups, applied Friday for a permit to hold a large-scale march in central Moscow on April 14. The so-called Dissenters’ March will take place with or without a permit from City Hall, organizers said. “We have a constitutional right to hold peaceful demonstrations,” said Alexander Averin, spokesman for the unregistered National Bolshevik Party, who submitted the application.

City officials promised a decision by Wednesday, Averin said. The Other Russia has also applied for a permit to hold a march in St. Petersburg on April 15. Police dispersed similar marches last month in St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod. Last December, some 2,500 activists from The Other Russia descended on Triumfalnaya Ploshchad, where they were surrounded by 8,500 riot police officers. “It is obvious that as the authorities take a harder line, the chances increase that the power vertical will simply collapse,” former chess champion turned opposition leader Garry Kasparov told reporters Friday.

Kasparov heads the United Civil Front, which is joined in The Other Russia by writer Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party and former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov’s Popular Democratic Union. Organizers say the march will proceed down Tverskaya Ulitsa to Teatralnaya Ploshchad. They expect up to 5,000 people to attend. Nikolai Kulikov, the city’s point man on security, said the needs of drivers would be factored into the decision, adding that drivers “aren’t likely to take kindly to street closures in the city center on a weekend,” Kommersant reported Friday. Kulikov’s secretary referred all questions to Sergei Tsoi, spokesman for Mayor Yury Luzhkov.

Tsoi was unavailable for comment Friday. In addition to a large police presence, organizers of the April 14 march are expecting to clash with a handful of nationalist Russian Orthodox Church groups, which have threatened the marchers. “If we aren’t scared of thousands of OMON [riot police], then why should we be scared of these groups?” Averin said. As well as flags with anti-Putin slogans, some of the demonstrators will be brandishing the black, yellow and white imperial flag, a powerful nationalist symbol. Yegor Ovchinnikov, co-director of Georgiyevtsy!, a nationalist Orthodox youth group, threatened retaliation against anyone carrying the flag during the march. “If participants of the march attack us, we will defend ourselves,” he told Kommersant. “And if they raise the imperial flag, we will consider that to be an attack,” “Ovchinnikov’s words do not scare us,” Averin said.

Pavel Zarifullin, a leader of the EuroAsian Youth Union, which calls for the return of imperial rule and emphasizes the role of the Russian Orthodox Church, said he was joining with other youth organizations to defy the dissenters. “The Other Russia says it wants ‘freedom against,'” Zarifullin said. “We want ‘freedom for.'”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

London in the Bear’s Embrace

Writing in the Moscow Times Alexei Bayer (pictured), a native Muscovite and currently a New York-Based economist, offers the following ominous thoughts on the infiltration of

In a song cataloguing the ills of contemporary Russia, sardonic balladeer Timur Shaov sings about Russians who choose to leave the country, cautioning them: “London is not elastic, we won’t all fit there.”

Londoners probably exaggerate when they claim that rich Russians have driven up their real estate prices — they used the same complaint against rich Arabs in the 1970s — but it is true that the vibrant, free-spending Russian community has contributed to the social, cultural and economic revival of the British capital.

There are Russian-speaking enclaves in Berlin, Tel Aviv and New York, but London has become the undisputed hub of Russian expat life, usurping the role played by Paris in the 1920s.

There are many reasons for this. English, rather than French before the Revolution or German in the early Soviet period, is now the foreign language a Russian is most likely to speak. London is closer to Moscow than New York, while getting a British visa is easier — and a damn sight less humiliating — than dealing with the rude and bureaucratic U.S. Consulate.

Britain has had a special connection to post-communist Russia ever since British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously declared in 1984 that she could do business with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The Russian colonization of London was started in the early 1990s by U.S. citizens of Russian-Jewish descent who flocked to the old country to make money but prudently parked their families in London. Many U.S. multinationals and financial institutions still run their Russian operations from Britain.

The 53 Russian billionaires on the Forbes list probably spend more time in Britain than anywhere else, including their native country. One, Roman Abramovich, has taken Chelsea to the top of English football. Another, Boris Berezovsky, has emerged as the Leon Trotsky of the Putin era and has turned London into the nerve center of Russian political opposition.

In fact, there has been talk of the British losing patience with their Russian residents after the poisoning last year of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. However, while the Brits may consider it bad manners to place highly radioactive polonium-210 into a restaurant teakettle, they are used to East Europeans settling scores in London, such as the 1978 murder of Bulgarian dissident Georgy Markov with a poisoned umbrella tip.

The British love affair with Russia will continue as long as it is good for business. So far, business has been great. Over the past three years, Russian companies have been instrumental in helping the City of London pull ahead of Wall Street as a global financial center. Russian IPOs totaled $4.9 billion in 2005 and rocketed to $14.5 billion last year. If analysts in are to be believed, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of Russian firms big and small are expected to go public in coming years.

Most are likely to find their way to the London Stock Exchange and to its Alternative Investment Market, geared to small, rapidly growing startups. Russian companies are especially attracted to London because it offers laxer rules for listed companies than New York, where regulations were tightened in the aftermath of Enron and other malfeasance at the start of the decade.

Russian corporate governance is notoriously shoddy, and many would not have been able to list in New York at all. And state-owned Rosneft, which alone raised over $10 billion in London last year, acquired its most valuable oil-producing assets after the government stripped them from Yukos.

Russian stocks suffered one of the worst sell-offs during the global market decline in late February and early March. This may not be the end of market selling. Investors should not forget that during the 1998 ruble crisis Russian companies didn’t hesitate to cheat their foreign investors. London may yet come to regret the bear’s hug.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

London in the Bear’s Embrace

Writing in the Moscow Times Alexei Bayer (pictured), a native Muscovite and currently a New York-Based economist, offers the following ominous thoughts on the infiltration of

In a song cataloguing the ills of contemporary Russia, sardonic balladeer Timur Shaov sings about Russians who choose to leave the country, cautioning them: “London is not elastic, we won’t all fit there.”

Londoners probably exaggerate when they claim that rich Russians have driven up their real estate prices — they used the same complaint against rich Arabs in the 1970s — but it is true that the vibrant, free-spending Russian community has contributed to the social, cultural and economic revival of the British capital.

There are Russian-speaking enclaves in Berlin, Tel Aviv and New York, but London has become the undisputed hub of Russian expat life, usurping the role played by Paris in the 1920s.

There are many reasons for this. English, rather than French before the Revolution or German in the early Soviet period, is now the foreign language a Russian is most likely to speak. London is closer to Moscow than New York, while getting a British visa is easier — and a damn sight less humiliating — than dealing with the rude and bureaucratic U.S. Consulate.

Britain has had a special connection to post-communist Russia ever since British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously declared in 1984 that she could do business with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The Russian colonization of London was started in the early 1990s by U.S. citizens of Russian-Jewish descent who flocked to the old country to make money but prudently parked their families in London. Many U.S. multinationals and financial institutions still run their Russian operations from Britain.

The 53 Russian billionaires on the Forbes list probably spend more time in Britain than anywhere else, including their native country. One, Roman Abramovich, has taken Chelsea to the top of English football. Another, Boris Berezovsky, has emerged as the Leon Trotsky of the Putin era and has turned London into the nerve center of Russian political opposition.

In fact, there has been talk of the British losing patience with their Russian residents after the poisoning last year of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. However, while the Brits may consider it bad manners to place highly radioactive polonium-210 into a restaurant teakettle, they are used to East Europeans settling scores in London, such as the 1978 murder of Bulgarian dissident Georgy Markov with a poisoned umbrella tip.

The British love affair with Russia will continue as long as it is good for business. So far, business has been great. Over the past three years, Russian companies have been instrumental in helping the City of London pull ahead of Wall Street as a global financial center. Russian IPOs totaled $4.9 billion in 2005 and rocketed to $14.5 billion last year. If analysts in are to be believed, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of Russian firms big and small are expected to go public in coming years.

Most are likely to find their way to the London Stock Exchange and to its Alternative Investment Market, geared to small, rapidly growing startups. Russian companies are especially attracted to London because it offers laxer rules for listed companies than New York, where regulations were tightened in the aftermath of Enron and other malfeasance at the start of the decade.

Russian corporate governance is notoriously shoddy, and many would not have been able to list in New York at all. And state-owned Rosneft, which alone raised over $10 billion in London last year, acquired its most valuable oil-producing assets after the government stripped them from Yukos.

Russian stocks suffered one of the worst sell-offs during the global market decline in late February and early March. This may not be the end of market selling. Investors should not forget that during the 1998 ruble crisis Russian companies didn’t hesitate to cheat their foreign investors. London may yet come to regret the bear’s hug.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

London in the Bear’s Embrace

Writing in the Moscow Times Alexei Bayer (pictured), a native Muscovite and currently a New York-Based economist, offers the following ominous thoughts on the infiltration of

In a song cataloguing the ills of contemporary Russia, sardonic balladeer Timur Shaov sings about Russians who choose to leave the country, cautioning them: “London is not elastic, we won’t all fit there.”

Londoners probably exaggerate when they claim that rich Russians have driven up their real estate prices — they used the same complaint against rich Arabs in the 1970s — but it is true that the vibrant, free-spending Russian community has contributed to the social, cultural and economic revival of the British capital.

There are Russian-speaking enclaves in Berlin, Tel Aviv and New York, but London has become the undisputed hub of Russian expat life, usurping the role played by Paris in the 1920s.

There are many reasons for this. English, rather than French before the Revolution or German in the early Soviet period, is now the foreign language a Russian is most likely to speak. London is closer to Moscow than New York, while getting a British visa is easier — and a damn sight less humiliating — than dealing with the rude and bureaucratic U.S. Consulate.

Britain has had a special connection to post-communist Russia ever since British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously declared in 1984 that she could do business with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The Russian colonization of London was started in the early 1990s by U.S. citizens of Russian-Jewish descent who flocked to the old country to make money but prudently parked their families in London. Many U.S. multinationals and financial institutions still run their Russian operations from Britain.

The 53 Russian billionaires on the Forbes list probably spend more time in Britain than anywhere else, including their native country. One, Roman Abramovich, has taken Chelsea to the top of English football. Another, Boris Berezovsky, has emerged as the Leon Trotsky of the Putin era and has turned London into the nerve center of Russian political opposition.

In fact, there has been talk of the British losing patience with their Russian residents after the poisoning last year of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. However, while the Brits may consider it bad manners to place highly radioactive polonium-210 into a restaurant teakettle, they are used to East Europeans settling scores in London, such as the 1978 murder of Bulgarian dissident Georgy Markov with a poisoned umbrella tip.

The British love affair with Russia will continue as long as it is good for business. So far, business has been great. Over the past three years, Russian companies have been instrumental in helping the City of London pull ahead of Wall Street as a global financial center. Russian IPOs totaled $4.9 billion in 2005 and rocketed to $14.5 billion last year. If analysts in are to be believed, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of Russian firms big and small are expected to go public in coming years.

Most are likely to find their way to the London Stock Exchange and to its Alternative Investment Market, geared to small, rapidly growing startups. Russian companies are especially attracted to London because it offers laxer rules for listed companies than New York, where regulations were tightened in the aftermath of Enron and other malfeasance at the start of the decade.

Russian corporate governance is notoriously shoddy, and many would not have been able to list in New York at all. And state-owned Rosneft, which alone raised over $10 billion in London last year, acquired its most valuable oil-producing assets after the government stripped them from Yukos.

Russian stocks suffered one of the worst sell-offs during the global market decline in late February and early March. This may not be the end of market selling. Investors should not forget that during the 1998 ruble crisis Russian companies didn’t hesitate to cheat their foreign investors. London may yet come to regret the bear’s hug.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

London in the Bear’s Embrace

Writing in the Moscow Times Alexei Bayer (pictured), a native Muscovite and currently a New York-Based economist, offers the following ominous thoughts on the infiltration of

In a song cataloguing the ills of contemporary Russia, sardonic balladeer Timur Shaov sings about Russians who choose to leave the country, cautioning them: “London is not elastic, we won’t all fit there.”

Londoners probably exaggerate when they claim that rich Russians have driven up their real estate prices — they used the same complaint against rich Arabs in the 1970s — but it is true that the vibrant, free-spending Russian community has contributed to the social, cultural and economic revival of the British capital.

There are Russian-speaking enclaves in Berlin, Tel Aviv and New York, but London has become the undisputed hub of Russian expat life, usurping the role played by Paris in the 1920s.

There are many reasons for this. English, rather than French before the Revolution or German in the early Soviet period, is now the foreign language a Russian is most likely to speak. London is closer to Moscow than New York, while getting a British visa is easier — and a damn sight less humiliating — than dealing with the rude and bureaucratic U.S. Consulate.

Britain has had a special connection to post-communist Russia ever since British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously declared in 1984 that she could do business with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The Russian colonization of London was started in the early 1990s by U.S. citizens of Russian-Jewish descent who flocked to the old country to make money but prudently parked their families in London. Many U.S. multinationals and financial institutions still run their Russian operations from Britain.

The 53 Russian billionaires on the Forbes list probably spend more time in Britain than anywhere else, including their native country. One, Roman Abramovich, has taken Chelsea to the top of English football. Another, Boris Berezovsky, has emerged as the Leon Trotsky of the Putin era and has turned London into the nerve center of Russian political opposition.

In fact, there has been talk of the British losing patience with their Russian residents after the poisoning last year of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. However, while the Brits may consider it bad manners to place highly radioactive polonium-210 into a restaurant teakettle, they are used to East Europeans settling scores in London, such as the 1978 murder of Bulgarian dissident Georgy Markov with a poisoned umbrella tip.

The British love affair with Russia will continue as long as it is good for business. So far, business has been great. Over the past three years, Russian companies have been instrumental in helping the City of London pull ahead of Wall Street as a global financial center. Russian IPOs totaled $4.9 billion in 2005 and rocketed to $14.5 billion last year. If analysts in are to be believed, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of Russian firms big and small are expected to go public in coming years.

Most are likely to find their way to the London Stock Exchange and to its Alternative Investment Market, geared to small, rapidly growing startups. Russian companies are especially attracted to London because it offers laxer rules for listed companies than New York, where regulations were tightened in the aftermath of Enron and other malfeasance at the start of the decade.

Russian corporate governance is notoriously shoddy, and many would not have been able to list in New York at all. And state-owned Rosneft, which alone raised over $10 billion in London last year, acquired its most valuable oil-producing assets after the government stripped them from Yukos.

Russian stocks suffered one of the worst sell-offs during the global market decline in late February and early March. This may not be the end of market selling. Investors should not forget that during the 1998 ruble crisis Russian companies didn’t hesitate to cheat their foreign investors. London may yet come to regret the bear’s hug.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

London in the Bear’s Embrace

Writing in the Moscow Times Alexei Bayer (pictured), a native Muscovite and currently a New York-Based economist, offers the following ominous thoughts on the infiltration of

In a song cataloguing the ills of contemporary Russia, sardonic balladeer Timur Shaov sings about Russians who choose to leave the country, cautioning them: “London is not elastic, we won’t all fit there.”

Londoners probably exaggerate when they claim that rich Russians have driven up their real estate prices — they used the same complaint against rich Arabs in the 1970s — but it is true that the vibrant, free-spending Russian community has contributed to the social, cultural and economic revival of the British capital.

There are Russian-speaking enclaves in Berlin, Tel Aviv and New York, but London has become the undisputed hub of Russian expat life, usurping the role played by Paris in the 1920s.

There are many reasons for this. English, rather than French before the Revolution or German in the early Soviet period, is now the foreign language a Russian is most likely to speak. London is closer to Moscow than New York, while getting a British visa is easier — and a damn sight less humiliating — than dealing with the rude and bureaucratic U.S. Consulate.

Britain has had a special connection to post-communist Russia ever since British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously declared in 1984 that she could do business with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The Russian colonization of London was started in the early 1990s by U.S. citizens of Russian-Jewish descent who flocked to the old country to make money but prudently parked their families in London. Many U.S. multinationals and financial institutions still run their Russian operations from Britain.

The 53 Russian billionaires on the Forbes list probably spend more time in Britain than anywhere else, including their native country. One, Roman Abramovich, has taken Chelsea to the top of English football. Another, Boris Berezovsky, has emerged as the Leon Trotsky of the Putin era and has turned London into the nerve center of Russian political opposition.

In fact, there has been talk of the British losing patience with their Russian residents after the poisoning last year of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. However, while the Brits may consider it bad manners to place highly radioactive polonium-210 into a restaurant teakettle, they are used to East Europeans settling scores in London, such as the 1978 murder of Bulgarian dissident Georgy Markov with a poisoned umbrella tip.

The British love affair with Russia will continue as long as it is good for business. So far, business has been great. Over the past three years, Russian companies have been instrumental in helping the City of London pull ahead of Wall Street as a global financial center. Russian IPOs totaled $4.9 billion in 2005 and rocketed to $14.5 billion last year. If analysts in are to be believed, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of Russian firms big and small are expected to go public in coming years.

Most are likely to find their way to the London Stock Exchange and to its Alternative Investment Market, geared to small, rapidly growing startups. Russian companies are especially attracted to London because it offers laxer rules for listed companies than New York, where regulations were tightened in the aftermath of Enron and other malfeasance at the start of the decade.

Russian corporate governance is notoriously shoddy, and many would not have been able to list in New York at all. And state-owned Rosneft, which alone raised over $10 billion in London last year, acquired its most valuable oil-producing assets after the government stripped them from Yukos.

Russian stocks suffered one of the worst sell-offs during the global market decline in late February and early March. This may not be the end of market selling. Investors should not forget that during the 1998 ruble crisis Russian companies didn’t hesitate to cheat their foreign investors. London may yet come to regret the bear’s hug.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

More on Gazprom’s March into Europe

Writing in the Korea Herald Keith C. Smith, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C, offers the following analysis of Russian energy imperialism in Europe:

When Gazprom, Russia’s natural gas monopoly, cut off supplies to Ukraine and Georgia in January 2006, the move was widely seen as a clear warning of the Kremlin’s willingness to use its energy resources to exert political influence over Europe. Twelve months later, Russia drummed home the significance of that act by shutting off oil supplies to Belarus for three days, causing a ripple effect on shipments to Western Europe.

Despite these supply-side threats, there have been few signs of an effective European Union-wide policy that would reduce dependence on Russian energy. The European Commission’s energy proposals, issued in January, are a step in the right direction. But they will have little direct effect on Russia’s energy relations with Europe, because they do not oblige Russia to adopt more competitive and transparent energy transport and investment policies.

On the contrary, European countries continue to forge bilateral deals with Russia, with little consideration for common EU interests. The West European EU members have shown scant concern over Russian pressure tactics against the new members in Central and Eastern Europe, calling into question the extent of EU solidarity regarding energy supplies. Since the Kremlin interrupted energy supplies to the Baltic states in 1990 in a futile attempt to stifle their independence movements, it has continued to use pipeline politics against countries such as Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania – all new EU members. For them, and for new democracies like Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, Russian energy dominance and its political consequences remain a serious threat.

Russia has profited from Europe’s disarray by moving to cement greater long-term European dependence on its energy, particularly natural gas by continuing its divide-and-rule tactics toward European governments. Since January 2006, Moscow has negotiated separate deals with energy companies from Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia, and Denmark that could undercut Europe’s efforts to build additional pipelines aimed at bypassing Russia’s near monopoly of supplies from Central Asia.

It initially appeared that Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel would be more sensitive to the energy security of Central and Eastern Europe. However, Merkel approved the expensive Northern Europe Gas Pipeline beneath the Baltic Sea, negotiated between her predecessor Gerhard Schroeder and President Vladimir Putin, and strongly opposed by fellow EU member Poland, which the pipeline will bypass. The NEGP will cost at least eight times as much as the alternative Yamal II pipeline, which would have gone overland through Poland.

Despite the European Commission’s good intentions, the EU’s larger members continue to resist submitting to a common EU energy policy. In mid-November, EU foreign ministers failed to agree on a common approach to Russian energy – just as reports resurfaced that Russia may seek to establish a natural gas cartel similar to OPEC.

The EU’s political will to counter its increasing dependence on Russia in the immediate future is thus open to serious doubt. Indeed, for the next five to ten years, Russia will be able to fulfill its gas contracts in Europe only by monopolizing exports of gas to Europe from Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. But the EU so far has chosen to ignore that Gazprom’s monopoly is a clear violation of the anti-trust and competition policies of the revised Rome Treaty and WTO obligations.

Russia clearly believes that the current tight world energy market and high prices give it enough leverage over the West to maintain its current approach. Russia consistently refuses to allow Western companies the same access to Russian facilities that Russian state energy companies already enjoy in Europe and the United States. That is likely to remain true as long as the West fails to adopt an energy strategy that causes the Kremlin to change course.

Putin denies that Russia is using its energy resources to coerce European governments, arguing that the decrease in gas supplies to Western Europe during the cut-off of gas to Ukraine in January 2006 was the result of Ukrainian “theft.” In its dispute with Belarus in January 2007, Russia leveled a similar accusation of theft from the oil pipeline that crosses the country. It also claims to have been subsidizing the price of energy to the Commonwealth of Independent States, when in reality it is the Central Asians who have been subsidizing Russia to an even greater extent.

Although the EU Commission appears to be committed to building a more open, competitive energy market in Europe, action against Russia’s noncompetitive practices within the EU has taken a back seat to internal differences over takeover battles for national energy “champions” involving companies from other member states. Russia must be convinced that its resources will be far more valuable if they are opened to international investment, managed transparently, and operated according to the legal and commercial rules of the international trading system. But that is unlikely in the absence of strong and unified European action.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

More on Gazprom’s March into Europe

Writing in the Korea Herald Keith C. Smith, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C, offers the following analysis of Russian energy imperialism in Europe:

When Gazprom, Russia’s natural gas monopoly, cut off supplies to Ukraine and Georgia in January 2006, the move was widely seen as a clear warning of the Kremlin’s willingness to use its energy resources to exert political influence over Europe. Twelve months later, Russia drummed home the significance of that act by shutting off oil supplies to Belarus for three days, causing a ripple effect on shipments to Western Europe.

Despite these supply-side threats, there have been few signs of an effective European Union-wide policy that would reduce dependence on Russian energy. The European Commission’s energy proposals, issued in January, are a step in the right direction. But they will have little direct effect on Russia’s energy relations with Europe, because they do not oblige Russia to adopt more competitive and transparent energy transport and investment policies.

On the contrary, European countries continue to forge bilateral deals with Russia, with little consideration for common EU interests. The West European EU members have shown scant concern over Russian pressure tactics against the new members in Central and Eastern Europe, calling into question the extent of EU solidarity regarding energy supplies. Since the Kremlin interrupted energy supplies to the Baltic states in 1990 in a futile attempt to stifle their independence movements, it has continued to use pipeline politics against countries such as Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania – all new EU members. For them, and for new democracies like Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, Russian energy dominance and its political consequences remain a serious threat.

Russia has profited from Europe’s disarray by moving to cement greater long-term European dependence on its energy, particularly natural gas by continuing its divide-and-rule tactics toward European governments. Since January 2006, Moscow has negotiated separate deals with energy companies from Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia, and Denmark that could undercut Europe’s efforts to build additional pipelines aimed at bypassing Russia’s near monopoly of supplies from Central Asia.

It initially appeared that Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel would be more sensitive to the energy security of Central and Eastern Europe. However, Merkel approved the expensive Northern Europe Gas Pipeline beneath the Baltic Sea, negotiated between her predecessor Gerhard Schroeder and President Vladimir Putin, and strongly opposed by fellow EU member Poland, which the pipeline will bypass. The NEGP will cost at least eight times as much as the alternative Yamal II pipeline, which would have gone overland through Poland.

Despite the European Commission’s good intentions, the EU’s larger members continue to resist submitting to a common EU energy policy. In mid-November, EU foreign ministers failed to agree on a common approach to Russian energy – just as reports resurfaced that Russia may seek to establish a natural gas cartel similar to OPEC.

The EU’s political will to counter its increasing dependence on Russia in the immediate future is thus open to serious doubt. Indeed, for the next five to ten years, Russia will be able to fulfill its gas contracts in Europe only by monopolizing exports of gas to Europe from Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. But the EU so far has chosen to ignore that Gazprom’s monopoly is a clear violation of the anti-trust and competition policies of the revised Rome Treaty and WTO obligations.

Russia clearly believes that the current tight world energy market and high prices give it enough leverage over the West to maintain its current approach. Russia consistently refuses to allow Western companies the same access to Russian facilities that Russian state energy companies already enjoy in Europe and the United States. That is likely to remain true as long as the West fails to adopt an energy strategy that causes the Kremlin to change course.

Putin denies that Russia is using its energy resources to coerce European governments, arguing that the decrease in gas supplies to Western Europe during the cut-off of gas to Ukraine in January 2006 was the result of Ukrainian “theft.” In its dispute with Belarus in January 2007, Russia leveled a similar accusation of theft from the oil pipeline that crosses the country. It also claims to have been subsidizing the price of energy to the Commonwealth of Independent States, when in reality it is the Central Asians who have been subsidizing Russia to an even greater extent.

Although the EU Commission appears to be committed to building a more open, competitive energy market in Europe, action against Russia’s noncompetitive practices within the EU has taken a back seat to internal differences over takeover battles for national energy “champions” involving companies from other member states. Russia must be convinced that its resources will be far more valuable if they are opened to international investment, managed transparently, and operated according to the legal and commercial rules of the international trading system. But that is unlikely in the absence of strong and unified European action.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

More on Gazprom’s March into Europe

Writing in the Korea Herald Keith C. Smith, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C, offers the following analysis of Russian energy imperialism in Europe:

When Gazprom, Russia’s natural gas monopoly, cut off supplies to Ukraine and Georgia in January 2006, the move was widely seen as a clear warning of the Kremlin’s willingness to use its energy resources to exert political influence over Europe. Twelve months later, Russia drummed home the significance of that act by shutting off oil supplies to Belarus for three days, causing a ripple effect on shipments to Western Europe.

Despite these supply-side threats, there have been few signs of an effective European Union-wide policy that would reduce dependence on Russian energy. The European Commission’s energy proposals, issued in January, are a step in the right direction. But they will have little direct effect on Russia’s energy relations with Europe, because they do not oblige Russia to adopt more competitive and transparent energy transport and investment policies.

On the contrary, European countries continue to forge bilateral deals with Russia, with little consideration for common EU interests. The West European EU members have shown scant concern over Russian pressure tactics against the new members in Central and Eastern Europe, calling into question the extent of EU solidarity regarding energy supplies. Since the Kremlin interrupted energy supplies to the Baltic states in 1990 in a futile attempt to stifle their independence movements, it has continued to use pipeline politics against countries such as Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania – all new EU members. For them, and for new democracies like Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, Russian energy dominance and its political consequences remain a serious threat.

Russia has profited from Europe’s disarray by moving to cement greater long-term European dependence on its energy, particularly natural gas by continuing its divide-and-rule tactics toward European governments. Since January 2006, Moscow has negotiated separate deals with energy companies from Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia, and Denmark that could undercut Europe’s efforts to build additional pipelines aimed at bypassing Russia’s near monopoly of supplies from Central Asia.

It initially appeared that Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel would be more sensitive to the energy security of Central and Eastern Europe. However, Merkel approved the expensive Northern Europe Gas Pipeline beneath the Baltic Sea, negotiated between her predecessor Gerhard Schroeder and President Vladimir Putin, and strongly opposed by fellow EU member Poland, which the pipeline will bypass. The NEGP will cost at least eight times as much as the alternative Yamal II pipeline, which would have gone overland through Poland.

Despite the European Commission’s good intentions, the EU’s larger members continue to resist submitting to a common EU energy policy. In mid-November, EU foreign ministers failed to agree on a common approach to Russian energy – just as reports resurfaced that Russia may seek to establish a natural gas cartel similar to OPEC.

The EU’s political will to counter its increasing dependence on Russia in the immediate future is thus open to serious doubt. Indeed, for the next five to ten years, Russia will be able to fulfill its gas contracts in Europe only by monopolizing exports of gas to Europe from Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. But the EU so far has chosen to ignore that Gazprom’s monopoly is a clear violation of the anti-trust and competition policies of the revised Rome Treaty and WTO obligations.

Russia clearly believes that the current tight world energy market and high prices give it enough leverage over the West to maintain its current approach. Russia consistently refuses to allow Western companies the same access to Russian facilities that Russian state energy companies already enjoy in Europe and the United States. That is likely to remain true as long as the West fails to adopt an energy strategy that causes the Kremlin to change course.

Putin denies that Russia is using its energy resources to coerce European governments, arguing that the decrease in gas supplies to Western Europe during the cut-off of gas to Ukraine in January 2006 was the result of Ukrainian “theft.” In its dispute with Belarus in January 2007, Russia leveled a similar accusation of theft from the oil pipeline that crosses the country. It also claims to have been subsidizing the price of energy to the Commonwealth of Independent States, when in reality it is the Central Asians who have been subsidizing Russia to an even greater extent.

Although the EU Commission appears to be committed to building a more open, competitive energy market in Europe, action against Russia’s noncompetitive practices within the EU has taken a back seat to internal differences over takeover battles for national energy “champions” involving companies from other member states. Russia must be convinced that its resources will be far more valuable if they are opened to international investment, managed transparently, and operated according to the legal and commercial rules of the international trading system. But that is unlikely in the absence of strong and unified European action.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

More on Gazprom’s March into Europe

Writing in the Korea Herald Keith C. Smith, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C, offers the following analysis of Russian energy imperialism in Europe:

When Gazprom, Russia’s natural gas monopoly, cut off supplies to Ukraine and Georgia in January 2006, the move was widely seen as a clear warning of the Kremlin’s willingness to use its energy resources to exert political influence over Europe. Twelve months later, Russia drummed home the significance of that act by shutting off oil supplies to Belarus for three days, causing a ripple effect on shipments to Western Europe.

Despite these supply-side threats, there have been few signs of an effective European Union-wide policy that would reduce dependence on Russian energy. The European Commission’s energy proposals, issued in January, are a step in the right direction. But they will have little direct effect on Russia’s energy relations with Europe, because they do not oblige Russia to adopt more competitive and transparent energy transport and investment policies.

On the contrary, European countries continue to forge bilateral deals with Russia, with little consideration for common EU interests. The West European EU members have shown scant concern over Russian pressure tactics against the new members in Central and Eastern Europe, calling into question the extent of EU solidarity regarding energy supplies. Since the Kremlin interrupted energy supplies to the Baltic states in 1990 in a futile attempt to stifle their independence movements, it has continued to use pipeline politics against countries such as Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania – all new EU members. For them, and for new democracies like Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, Russian energy dominance and its political consequences remain a serious threat.

Russia has profited from Europe’s disarray by moving to cement greater long-term European dependence on its energy, particularly natural gas by continuing its divide-and-rule tactics toward European governments. Since January 2006, Moscow has negotiated separate deals with energy companies from Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia, and Denmark that could undercut Europe’s efforts to build additional pipelines aimed at bypassing Russia’s near monopoly of supplies from Central Asia.

It initially appeared that Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel would be more sensitive to the energy security of Central and Eastern Europe. However, Merkel approved the expensive Northern Europe Gas Pipeline beneath the Baltic Sea, negotiated between her predecessor Gerhard Schroeder and President Vladimir Putin, and strongly opposed by fellow EU member Poland, which the pipeline will bypass. The NEGP will cost at least eight times as much as the alternative Yamal II pipeline, which would have gone overland through Poland.

Despite the European Commission’s good intentions, the EU’s larger members continue to resist submitting to a common EU energy policy. In mid-November, EU foreign ministers failed to agree on a common approach to Russian energy – just as reports resurfaced that Russia may seek to establish a natural gas cartel similar to OPEC.

The EU’s political will to counter its increasing dependence on Russia in the immediate future is thus open to serious doubt. Indeed, for the next five to ten years, Russia will be able to fulfill its gas contracts in Europe only by monopolizing exports of gas to Europe from Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. But the EU so far has chosen to ignore that Gazprom’s monopoly is a clear violation of the anti-trust and competition policies of the revised Rome Treaty and WTO obligations.

Russia clearly believes that the current tight world energy market and high prices give it enough leverage over the West to maintain its current approach. Russia consistently refuses to allow Western companies the same access to Russian facilities that Russian state energy companies already enjoy in Europe and the United States. That is likely to remain true as long as the West fails to adopt an energy strategy that causes the Kremlin to change course.

Putin denies that Russia is using its energy resources to coerce European governments, arguing that the decrease in gas supplies to Western Europe during the cut-off of gas to Ukraine in January 2006 was the result of Ukrainian “theft.” In its dispute with Belarus in January 2007, Russia leveled a similar accusation of theft from the oil pipeline that crosses the country. It also claims to have been subsidizing the price of energy to the Commonwealth of Independent States, when in reality it is the Central Asians who have been subsidizing Russia to an even greater extent.

Although the EU Commission appears to be committed to building a more open, competitive energy market in Europe, action against Russia’s noncompetitive practices within the EU has taken a back seat to internal differences over takeover battles for national energy “champions” involving companies from other member states. Russia must be convinced that its resources will be far more valuable if they are opened to international investment, managed transparently, and operated according to the legal and commercial rules of the international trading system. But that is unlikely in the absence of strong and unified European action.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

More on Gazprom’s March into Europe

Writing in the Korea Herald Keith C. Smith, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C, offers the following analysis of Russian energy imperialism in Europe:

When Gazprom, Russia’s natural gas monopoly, cut off supplies to Ukraine and Georgia in January 2006, the move was widely seen as a clear warning of the Kremlin’s willingness to use its energy resources to exert political influence over Europe. Twelve months later, Russia drummed home the significance of that act by shutting off oil supplies to Belarus for three days, causing a ripple effect on shipments to Western Europe.

Despite these supply-side threats, there have been few signs of an effective European Union-wide policy that would reduce dependence on Russian energy. The European Commission’s energy proposals, issued in January, are a step in the right direction. But they will have little direct effect on Russia’s energy relations with Europe, because they do not oblige Russia to adopt more competitive and transparent energy transport and investment policies.

On the contrary, European countries continue to forge bilateral deals with Russia, with little consideration for common EU interests. The West European EU members have shown scant concern over Russian pressure tactics against the new members in Central and Eastern Europe, calling into question the extent of EU solidarity regarding energy supplies. Since the Kremlin interrupted energy supplies to the Baltic states in 1990 in a futile attempt to stifle their independence movements, it has continued to use pipeline politics against countries such as Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania – all new EU members. For them, and for new democracies like Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, Russian energy dominance and its political consequences remain a serious threat.

Russia has profited from Europe’s disarray by moving to cement greater long-term European dependence on its energy, particularly natural gas by continuing its divide-and-rule tactics toward European governments. Since January 2006, Moscow has negotiated separate deals with energy companies from Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia, and Denmark that could undercut Europe’s efforts to build additional pipelines aimed at bypassing Russia’s near monopoly of supplies from Central Asia.

It initially appeared that Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel would be more sensitive to the energy security of Central and Eastern Europe. However, Merkel approved the expensive Northern Europe Gas Pipeline beneath the Baltic Sea, negotiated between her predecessor Gerhard Schroeder and President Vladimir Putin, and strongly opposed by fellow EU member Poland, which the pipeline will bypass. The NEGP will cost at least eight times as much as the alternative Yamal II pipeline, which would have gone overland through Poland.

Despite the European Commission’s good intentions, the EU’s larger members continue to resist submitting to a common EU energy policy. In mid-November, EU foreign ministers failed to agree on a common approach to Russian energy – just as reports resurfaced that Russia may seek to establish a natural gas cartel similar to OPEC.

The EU’s political will to counter its increasing dependence on Russia in the immediate future is thus open to serious doubt. Indeed, for the next five to ten years, Russia will be able to fulfill its gas contracts in Europe only by monopolizing exports of gas to Europe from Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. But the EU so far has chosen to ignore that Gazprom’s monopoly is a clear violation of the anti-trust and competition policies of the revised Rome Treaty and WTO obligations.

Russia clearly believes that the current tight world energy market and high prices give it enough leverage over the West to maintain its current approach. Russia consistently refuses to allow Western companies the same access to Russian facilities that Russian state energy companies already enjoy in Europe and the United States. That is likely to remain true as long as the West fails to adopt an energy strategy that causes the Kremlin to change course.

Putin denies that Russia is using its energy resources to coerce European governments, arguing that the decrease in gas supplies to Western Europe during the cut-off of gas to Ukraine in January 2006 was the result of Ukrainian “theft.” In its dispute with Belarus in January 2007, Russia leveled a similar accusation of theft from the oil pipeline that crosses the country. It also claims to have been subsidizing the price of energy to the Commonwealth of Independent States, when in reality it is the Central Asians who have been subsidizing Russia to an even greater extent.

Although the EU Commission appears to be committed to building a more open, competitive energy market in Europe, action against Russia’s noncompetitive practices within the EU has taken a back seat to internal differences over takeover battles for national energy “champions” involving companies from other member states. Russia must be convinced that its resources will be far more valuable if they are opened to international investment, managed transparently, and operated according to the legal and commercial rules of the international trading system. But that is unlikely in the absence of strong and unified European action.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Zaxi on Iran and the Oil Web

The bilingual zaxiblog on Livejournal has invited LR to cross-post the following analysis of the Iran quagmire:

This week zaxi drew a deep breath and read Russia’s first foreign policy review ever written for a president. It comically came on the eighth and – seemingly – final year of Vladimir Putin’s reign and added up to more than 100 pages.

zaxi was moved to such altruistic pursuits by Russia’s eye-catching decision to thumb its nose at Iran and hide the fuel from its first nuclear power plant. So a pity that Iran was not awarded a single full sentence here. Instead zaxi learned what might have driven BP to turn into a public relations arm of Rosneft in the face of being banished from Russia. This document is funny that way.

The modern world according to Sergei Lavrov was formed with the emergence of Russia as a rich power and the shattering of US hegemony against Iraq. The former was greeted with derision in Western quarters where Cold War fogies still roam. The latter spurred radical Islam.

But the crux of the argument made from the seventh floor of Stalin’s skyscraper on Smolenka is that none of this matters much – Russia has “new-gained foreign policy self-dependence” that must be exercised by protecting trade interests rather than trying to be liked.

The European Union is pretty much dismissed outright. It is a relic confused about its new world standing that Russia will treat accordingly. “The point of reference for Russian policy in Europe is made on bilateral relations.” And those will be primarily with France and Germany – “the leading European nations.” This phrase is typed in bold to emphasize that EU members “east of Vienna” are pesky novices trying to split Europe over Russia.

Britain gets its own mention as “an important but uneasy partner.” Its seems remarkable that a broad policy assessment still picks on London for giving refuge to “so-called new political immigrants.” Thus Boris Berezovsky and a former Chechen press secretary get more play here than Iran.

Human rights are useful – when conditions are right. “The artificial, forced democratization thrust upon from abroad” leads to “international anarchy.” The OSCE just avoids being called unprintable names.

Meanwhile the United States must be dealt with primarily because it has fingers stuck in so many sticky places. It has turned more pliable though now that its fake armor of invincibility lies scattered across Iraq. “With the Administration’s more sober views of its capabilities, there is potential for new, expanded cooperation with the US within frameworks of multilateral institutions – first of all, the UN.”

Thus Paris and Berlin get their personal dinner invitations. Washington must attend formal parties to meet Moscow while it sits flanked by friends.

Washington is advised to engage Moscow to resolve “deformed and dangerous” Islamic radicalism borne out of US policies. Yet Russia also doubts the existence of an “Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas link-up that supposedly threatens to destabilize the Persian Gulf.”

So it would seem unclear how Russia intends to help or where it sees the problem. The ministry’s sole recommendation for Putin on the Middle East is “to stimulate economic and energy diplomacy” there.

And yet… There goes Russia refusing to fuel a Bushehr plant it had spent 10 years building until Iran comes clean on its nuclear arms plans. This after years of reading a script that said clearly that Iran’s nuclear power and weapons were separate matters.

And there it votes with the West for a second round of Iranian sanctions. Moscow’s UN man then speaks of still more sanctions “when… if” they come being the fault of Iranian insubordination.

And there goes Iran calling Russia an “unreliable partner” and muttering about elephants having long memories.

So is this foreign policy review just a scary Russian fairy tale Moscow reads the West before kissing it good night?

Unfortunately – no.

US officials say Russia made the decision to keep fuel away from Bushehr until Iran opened up its weapons program at least two years ago. This was done out of pure self-preservation and reported directly to Washington – and obviously not to Tehran.

In the meantime Moscow desperately tried to convince Tehran to ship the processed fuel back to Russia in a transparent and verifiable manner. That failed along with the broader security talks. By now the 800 million dollar project stands almost completed and all but the last bills have been drawn. So Russia came up with a largely mythical Bushehr non-payment crisis to cover up its tracks and freeze the launch.

But this policy assessment report was released two years after that Bushehr decision. And this week Russia torpedoed a UN resolution demanding that Iran release the 15 British sailors it seized in what most agree were Iraqi waters.

This review in fact reflects the seismic shift in Russia’s relations with the West over that two-year span. And perhaps nowhere has this strategy changed more aggressively than in Moscow’s relations with the foreign energy firms.

BP at the moment sticks out like a sore Western thumb that still clings on to control of its Russian holdings. The Wall Street Journal reports that 29 percent of the giant’s oil reserves and 12 percent of its post-tax profits are in Russia – numbers set to implode with the imminent fall of the outsized Kovykta field into state hands.

The fate of Kovykta now seems sealed but BP still would like to lose it on best terms possible. More importantly it hopes to replace the band of billionaires making up its TNK partners in Russia with Rosneft. Not that the TNK partner necessarily want to go – it is just that the cards seem to be saying that their game will be up before Kovykta goes on line. The state (in the name of Rosneft) would thus give BP long-term security while – and this is the pipedream version of events – still allowing it to oversee operations.

And so BP sort of bid against Rosneft for the latest Yukos inheritance piece in hopes of making the auction look fair in the eyes of the blind and anyone desperately trying to look the other way.

The stake went to Rosneft at 800 million dollars below market value after BP placed a few perfunctory bids and then sneaked out of the room.

“This was 100 million dollars above the start price,” a BP spokesman told the Financial Times in manner of justification. “We would have to sell three billion liters of petrol in the UK to make 100 million dollars.”

To have somebody in the company believe this explanation holds water for FT readers illustrates the depths that BP has plumbed to accommodate its Russian existence – its perception of reality possibly altered after spending so many years in offices overlooking the truly imposing defense ministry.

Which brings zaxi to the public relations portion of Russia’s foreign policy report whose line BP was tracing so closely: “An important resource of this (public relations) work are the international companies that have business interests in Russia and which are suffering from the politicized information about Russia in the world media.”

Perhaps BP now too believes that Kovykta is slipping away because Russia wants to get even for all that unfair Western coverage. In any event – its bid not only lined Rosneft pockets (the auction could have been called off because no second bidder had the cash to take part) but also justified the treatment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky whose jailing BP did at one stage protest.

Yet BP cannot be expected to do Russia’s Western bidding alone.

“(W)e can fully rely on the support of influential circles within the Western community such as, for example, those in the conservative Christian-democratic spectrum,” the foreign ministry tells Putin.

So do not be surprised if Russia soon makes a guest appearance on the 700 Club.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

LR Scooped the Moscow Times Thrice Last Week

Monday’s edition the Moscow Times reported three items LR and Publius Pundit covered last week: (1) the Kremlin’s attempt to censor Kommersant; (2) the upcoming “Other Russia” protest action in Moscow; (3) Mironov’s call for additional terms for Putin. First LR scooped the New York Times on the MGU student protest, now the MT. Read all about it on LR!

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

On the Trail of Litvinenko’s Killers

The Litvinenko File by Martin Sixsmith, published today by Macmillan Press, goes on sale today. The Times of London offers readers an extract:

It was six o’clock on a Monday evening and the snowstorm had set in for the day. Cutting down the side of GUM, the Victorian department store that stares across Red Square to the Kremlin, I could see barely 10ft in front of me.

The red brick of the Kremlin wall emerged from the gloom and I was transported back to the first time I had come here, 20 years earlier. Then I was a young reporter with a coveted pass to attend Mikhail Gorbachev’s groundbreaking Congress of People’s Deputies, where democrats slugged it out with communist dinosaurs as Russia engaged in real political debate for the first time.

Now, in 2007, I couldn’t help wondering if much had changed. The welcome at the Spassky Gate was pretty much the same: three uniformed guards with rifles and a metal detector. But they allowed themselves a welcoming smile.

From the shadows a figure called my name. Aleksei was young, slim and cheerily informal. We chatted as we turned into the long yellow-stucco building that houses the presidential administration, the seat of power.

In the lift to the third floor I asked Aleksei who he worked for. The answer was an embarrassed: “Actually I work for the FSB; but don’t worry, I’m not a spy.”

The FSB is the Russian security service, successor to the Soviet KGB. It was about the death of a former member of the FSB that I had come to the Kremlin.

I wanted to know whether President Vladimir Putin, Russia’s most powerful leader since Joseph Stalin, had ordered the agonising death in a London hospital of Alexander Litvinenko. IT is hard to imagine that only five months ago the world had never heard of “Sasha” Litvinenko, the boy from the deep Russian provinces who rose through the ranks of the world’s most feared security service, who alleged murder and corruption in the Russian government, fled to London and took the shilling of Moscow’s avowed enemy before dying in the most sensational of circumstances last November — apparently a martyr in the covert war between the Kremlin and its political opponents.

As a habitué of Russian exile circles in London, I knew who Litvinenko was and that he was closely associated with the kingpin of the exiles, Boris Berezovsky.

Litvinenko’s second wife Marina describes him as boyish and emotional, but she says he had ruthlessness in him too. Even his closest friends say he probably had the blood of more than one victim on his hands. But he dispatched them while carrying out his duty. His constant refrain was that he had always behaved loyally and honestly.

He spent most of his career being loyal to the authorities in his country, whoever they were: first the communists, then Boris Yeltsin’s reformers, then the hardline autocracy imposed by Putin. He used to speak of Putin, a former KGB spy, as his role model, idolising him with an intensity bordering on love. But he was transformed to an acrimonious, diehard foe.

For six years Litvinenko had been venting his bile on Putin from London, hurling ever more outrageous accusations including murder and paedophilia. He had also directed increasingly bitter polemics at his former colleagues in the FSB. He had become involved in murky business dealings, with dark suggestions of blackmail plots. And he had exasperated and finally fallen out with Berezovsky himself.

The details of his death are now known worldwide. The British police have established that — in London on November 1 last year — someone persuaded him to eat or drink a dose of polonium 210, which destroyed his internal organs before doctors could discover what was killing him.

There is overwhelming evidence that Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, former FSB men who met him that day, left a polonium trail all over west London. But there is no evidence that they administered the poison. Nor is there any obvious personal motive for their wanting to kill him.

Many others did have a motive for murder. In the end someone’s patience snapped. So who had the motive, and the means, to carry out what was to all intents and purposes the world’s first act of international nuclear terrorism? The answer lies in the social and political upheaval that brought Putin to power and in the business conflicts, vested interests and political corruption that have divided Russia into warring camps.

In this war each side accuses the other of the darkest acts, sometimes without the slightest basis in fact, and the hand of Putin or Berezovsky is seen behind every evil. Men like Litvinenko have been turned into the expendable pawns of ruthless masters.

As I conducted my research into his background, I was amazed by the life he had led, the risks he had taken and the enemies he had made with such insouciance. His past threw up so many potential reasons for his murder that I was surprised he had survived as long as he did.

The son of a military man, Litvinenko did his military service in an elite division under the command of the KGB and was later invited to join the KGB’s counter-intel-ligence service in the twilight years of the Soviet Union. In the mid1990s, when Chechnya was fighting for independence, he was sent there with the new FSB’s special forces, the Osobysty. He claimed to have experienced an epiphany interrogating a teenage Chechen fighter who told him: “I am not alone; the whole of my class enlisted straight after we graduated from school. We just knew we had to do it . . . for our country.”

There were also less savoury tales of his conduct. His former FSB commander in Chechnya, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Gusak, publicly accused him after he was poisoned last November of having been a torturer, a killer and a coward.

It is indisputable that the FSB committed many atrocities in Chechnya, and some of Litvinenko’s closest friends accept that, as a member of the feared Osobysty, he must have been involved in dirty work.

Gusak, however, is not a disinterested witness. He was intimately linked with an episode that bears directly on Litvinenko’s murder.

AFTER Chechnya, Litvinenko was invited to join a new unit, the Directorate for the Analysis and Suppression of the Activities of Criminal Organisations (URPO), set up to wipe out the crime bosses who were plundering Russia.

In Chechnya, questions of legality and human rights rarely impeded FSB operations. Now the same bespredel (lawlessness within the state) was going to be unleashed in Moscow. Litvinenko would later describe URPO as the “bureau of nonjudicial executions”.

Andrei Nekrasov, a film maker and friend of Litvinenko, told me: “That unit, to be completely frank, was composed of people that the leadership thought were capable of pulling off quite violent operations . . . and never talking about them.”

The director of the FSB at the time, Nikolai Kovalyov, says: “Litvinenko and co supported the creation of so-called White Death Brigades — in plain language, hit squads. Their reasoning was that it was impossible to combat organised crime in Russia with legal methods, so illegal methods would have to be used. That is to say, murders . . .”

In late 1997, URPO was put under the control of a senior FSB colonel, Yevgeny Khokholkov, whom Litvinenko had investigated for connections with drug gangs. Despite a compromising videotape, Khokholkov had kept his job. Disenchantment was sown in Litvinenko’s mind.

It heightened when he was ordered to ambush and beat up Mikhail Trepashkin, an FSB lieutenant-colonel who had been probing allegations that high-ranking officers were involved in serious crime.

Unable to defend himself, the slightly built Trepashkin begged Litvinenko for the chance to explain what he had found out about FSB corruption. Marina Litvinenko says he convinced her husband that things were badly wrong in the FSB and that someone had to do something about it.

The chance to do something soon arose. On December 27 1997, according to Litvinenko, he and four other URPO officers were called into Khokholkov’s office and told to assassinate Boris Berezovsky.

No written order was given. There was clearly a well-established process of deniability in place: such decisions were taken in cosy chats on sofas in private offices with no minutes and no paper trail. This is of crucial importance now in examining the decision-making process behind Litvinenko’s own assassination nearly a decade later.

In 1997 Berezovsky was probably the most powerful man in Russia. He and other postcommunist billion-aires had rescued Yeltsin from defeat in the 1996 presidential elections with unlimited money and media support. In return, Yeltsin had rewarded them with the keys to Russia’s economy, auctioning off state companies at knockdown prices.

Berezovsky was also a media magnate. His real interest, however, was the acquisition of power. He exerted such influence over the weak and chronically drunk president that he was widely regarded as making decisions for him. By the time Litvinenko was ordered to kill him, everyone knew that Berezovsky was a man not to be trifled with.

Litvinenko had an additional problem: he knew Berezovsky well. He had investigated a bomb attack on the rising tycoon in 1994, and they had become friends. The relationship had been cemented when, Berezovsky says, Litvinenko prevented the Moscow police from framing him for the murder of a prominent television presenter. “Alexander really saved my life, there was no doubt about it.”

For two months, Litvinenko and his comrades carefully teased out who was behind the proposed assassination, talking to contacts and sources, trying to discover if its backers were themselves powerful people and whether or not it would be in their own interests to go along with it. They knew a bad call could mean an end to their careers and, quite possibly, their lives.

Concluding that the top people in the FSB didn’t know about the order to kill Berezovsky, they reported it to the director. The move backfired. Khokholkov denied their story, and they were put under investigation.

Meeting secretly, the five men decided to seek protection from their proposed victim. Berezovsky could be a very powerful patron for a group of ambitious FSB officers looking to further their careers. Litvinenko told him the whole story.

“Initially I thought it was just a joke,” says Berezovsky. But he also spotted the potential to get control of the FSB.

He asked Litvinenko to bring the other four men to his office to make a videotape of their allegations. Only three turned up, but on the video one is heard quoting the order they received: “He said to us, ‘If there was an order to knock someone off — sorry, to kill; he said to kill — could you fix it?”

Berezovsky: “To kill me?” Agent: “Yes, of course you.” An FSB man later identified as Alexander Gusak also describes on the tape a face-to-face meeting with Khokholkov where he was asked if he would kill Berezovsky. “I replied that if it was properly sanctioned and had the right stamps — that is, the stamp of the prosecutor’s office and the stamp of our own organisation — and it had the right materials to back it up, I would be ready to kill Berezovsky and anyone else.”

Berezovsky took the incriminating videotape to a rising star in the Kremlin: Vladimir Putin, at the time a presidential aide. Berezovsky considered him a reformer and a friend. They regularly visited each other’s houses and even took skiing holidays together.

At first the ploy seemed to work. Putin took charge of the FSB, and the hated Khokholkov was transferred. Litvinenko thought he would have a big role in a cleaned-up FSB under his hero Putin.

Berezovsky had helped get Putin appointed and now expected him to pay this favour back by installing friendly faces in all the positions of power. If things worked out, the FSB would become a loyal Berezovsky fiefdom for him in the looming power battles over the succession to Yeltsin.

It didn’t work out, however. Putin’s debt of gratitude was small beer compared with the need to look after number one. The Berezovsky camp was just one among several warring Kremlin factions he weighed up to decide where his best interests lay.

To apply pressure on Putin, Berezovsky told Litvinenko and his colleagues to go public with their revelations about the assassination plot in a televised press conference. When some of the shocked agents refused — it was unheard of for FSB men to go public — he told them they had come too far to turn back.

On the eve of the press conference he summoned them to a grey-stuccoed building that had once been the family mansion of the noble Smirnov family. Inside, they were served drinks in Berezovsky’s club, the Logovaz Salon, with its gilded walls, ornate decorations and giant aquarium. Then they were coached on the statements they would be making.

Next day, in front of the cameras, Litvinenko accused his superiors of extortion, kidnappings and murder and, in a not very coded message to Putin, called on the FSB to cleanse itself.

Litvinenko identified himself but the five men with him were not so brave: one wore a ski mask and the others dark glasses. I now believe I know their names, which would recur with ominous regularity in both Litvinenko’s future life and the investigation of his eventual death.

They included Gusak, who would accuse Litvinenko of war crimes in Chechnya; Colonel Viktor Shebalin, who sat next to Litvinenko making an exaggerated show of friendship and support; and Major Andrei Ponkin, who was the only other man to speak. Ponkin alleged, among other things, that he and others had been instructed to kill the dissident former FSB man Mikhail Trepashkin.

Far from being nudged into cooperating, Putin was infuriated. The whistle-blowers were called in by FSB interrogators. Some were threatened, others offered inducements. It was made forcefully clear to them that they had brought shame on the service and the motherland. They could face the prospect of prison, or they could recant and agree to work against the “traitors” who had led them astray.

The question of exactly which of Litvinenko’s comrades succumbed to these blandishments is a vital piece of information for anyone seeking to unravel the events that led to his death.

Marina Litvinenko claims Shebalin was working all along for the FSB as “a provocateur”. Litvinenko’s friend, the historian Yuri Felshtinsky, believes Shebalin, Ponkin and Gusak all took roles in Putin’s subsequent war against Berezovsky and Litvinenko.

From that day on they would have every incentive to silence the increasingly irritating voice of the man they claimed had tricked them into putting their lives and careers on the line.

Events then moved rapidly. Berezovsky slid down the greasy pole of Kremlin politics as Putin rose up it. He was given a ceremonial job that kept him out of Moscow, and in March 1999 he was ousted altogether. Within days Litvinenko was arrested for trumped up petty crimes.

Felshtinsky says that the FSB tried to persuade Litvinenko to cut a deal in the same way that his former colleagues seem to have done. “When he refused . . . the FSB told him, ‘Look. Now you must know the end of the story. The end of the story is that you are going to be killed, or you are going to be put in prison and killed in prison. But you know our organisation: there is no other way. You are going to be killed’.”

He was charged with beating up an arrested terror suspect. To seasoned FSB men this was ridiculous; few could think when arrested terror suspects were not beaten up.

The prosecution produced a grainy video of a blond FSB officer punching a crouching prisoner in the face. The interrogator is wearing a military cap and I certainly could not identify him as being Sasha Litvinenko. He is, however, surrounded by apparent URPO agents.

Two officers who had served with Litvinenko recognised the film and they knew the man in it was not him. They found the original of the tape, which had other footage proving his innocence.

According to Litvinenko’s father, Walter, they were about to produce the tape in court when Litvinenko was threatened in his cell. “The FSB came to him and said, ‘You have a son. If you produce that video in court, you should be very afraid for your son’.”

Even without the video, the military judge threw out the case. But as he did so a team of crack spetsnaz troops — Russia’s SAS — stormed into court and the military prosecutor announced new charges. After another acquittal a third trial was ordered, and harassment continued.

FSB interrogators warned Litvinenko: “If they find you not guilty this time, it’s not you we’ll be talking to; we’ll sort things out with your wife and your kid. You don’t think you’ll get away, do you? You’re a traitor to the system and you’re going to be punished.”

His friend Felshtinksy made an unofficial approach to an FSB general, asking if a deal could perhaps be done for the Litvinenkos to slip quietly into exile abroad. The general replied, “I can honestly tell you there is no way for that man to leave Russia alive. And if ever I meet him again, I will personally kill him with my two hands.”

That, says Marina Litvinenko, is when Sasha made up his mind to flee, as Berezovsky had done. During his personal drama Yeltsin had resigned and Putin was now president.

SEVEN years later, at the end of a wide Kremlin corridor, Aleksei ushered me through an anteroom into the large office of Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s head of information.

Peskov is a sprightly man in his early forties, a career diplomat who enjoys the confidence of the president. Over a cup of hot Georgian tea I tried to gauge if his boss really could have been involved in the Litvinenko poisoning, as the dead man’s friends have claimed, or if the accusations were merely the fabrications or wishful thinking of enemies at home and abroad.

An earnest, sophisticated man, Peskov is far removed from the bullying, stonewalling Soviet officials I used to meet. He comes across as reasonable and sincere in his love for his country and his faith in his president. He knows Putin intimately — he works with him every day — and feels personal resentment on behalf of his boss.

I knew he had discussed the Litvinenko case with Putin at great length and had given him advice on how to remain calm and measured in the face of what the president believed to be an unjustified personal affront against himself.

“You know, I would never discuss that [advice] in public. But nevertheless, what is obvious is that the president felt himself necessary to express his condolences to the family of Litvinenko. He accepted that it was a human tragedy — a man died — but he never tried to camouflage, to hide the fact that he was not fond of Mr Litvinenko. And you will find very few people in my country — including his first wife, by the way, and his two children — who are fond of him or who are proud of him. This is not the case in my country.”

It was a strange sensation, sitting in the heart of the Kremlin discussing the personal feelings of the most powerful man in Russia. Would previous occupants of these quarters have been so open with a foreigner?

I asked how Putin felt about the allegations levelled at him personally, how it felt to be accused of murder. Peskov said he would not discuss such things in public, but I later spoke to another source close to Putin who knew about his feelings.

“The president is very upset by this,” he told me. “He is upset by these accusations made personally about him. He simply can’t believe that people are saying these things about him as a person. He’s very angry about the way the British press has named him as a murderer — that’s why he won’t speak about it any more.”

I asked why, if this was the case, Putin had refrained from expressing his anger and hurt. He told me: “The president doesn’t like his feelings being discussed in public.”

Even if Putin had not personally ordered the Litvinenko killing, it could still have been the unauthorised work of the Russian security services. I asked Peskov if the president had ordered an inquiry to make sure the FSB was not involved.

“Look, I don’t know. I am being very frank with you now. It’s not a question of Putin not being sure if such an involvement was possible or impossible. It is hard for us to imagine that there is the slightest idea that such a possibility could exist. For us the tiniest possibility is out of the question. There is not even the tiniest possibility, not even a hypothetical possibility of our special services being involved.”

Up to now I had been convinced by what I had heard. On the balance of evidence I was coming to the conclusion that Putin himself had had no hand in the murder. But this was something different: Peskov could offer no evidence that ruled out the possibility of a freelance operation, or that suggested Moscow had even tried to rule one out.

When I pressed him he told me: “For that purpose our prosecutor’s office has opened its own investigation.” It was clear where I would have to go.

The office of the prosecutor general of the Russian Federation is set behind a small, anonymous-look-ing wooden door on Bolshaya Dmitrovka, a street behind the Bolshoi theatre. The prosecutor’s office is a powerful institution, combining oversight of policing, investigation and prosecution. The Metropolitan police’s finest visited it two weeks before me, looking for clues in the Litvinenko case.

As in the Kremlin, my reception was warm and friendly. Two young detectives, Sasha and Kolya, walked me upstairs to a cosy, overheated second-floor office. An attractive woman in her mid-thirties introduced herself as Marina Gridneva, senior legal counsel and head of the information division. She introduced another detective, and they produced a teapot and a large sponge cake topped with apricot jam. It was, explained Marina, homemade. With a cup of a very unusual, aromatic tea, I ate two slices.

The charm offensive seemed genuine and they laughed when I said journalists would not get similar treatment from Scotland Yard. But hospitality did not mean they were going to answer my questions. All my inquiries about the possibility of FSB involvement in Litvinenko’s murder were met with a steely: “That is part of an ongoing investigation so we cannot comment.”

After 20 minutes we seemed to be getting nowhere. I decided to be a little provocative. “What about the new laws of July 2006?” I asked. One of them allows the president to use the Russian secret services to eliminate “extremists” in Russia and on foreign territory. And another expands the definition of “extrem-ism” to include anyone “libellously critical of the Russian authorities”?

“It looks like a pretty clear mandate to go out and kill people like Litvinenko, doesn’t it?” I suggested.

The two detectives asked for a moment to consult. They tapped at a computer and phoned for some documents. My tape recorder registered an air of mild panic. Marina’s voice is heard asking me to help myself to some more tea and cake while they sort things out. Then, after a lengthy pause, they are back with the explanation: those laws were not adopted with any evil intent. They were a response to the abduction and murder of five Russian diplomats in Iraq.

It seemed I was going to get nowhere. They had stonewalled me with a charming but immovable double act. So I said, “Okay, thanks very much”, and they clearly thought the interview was over because they started smiling and suddenly became very expansive. Fortunately, my tape was still running to record what came next.

“Look, Martin, do you really think we’d bother assassinating a nobody like Litvinenko? Someone who left the country God knows how long ago? Who was no threat to us and didn’t have any secrets to betray? . . . He just wasn’t important enough. He didn’t know any secrets that would be a reason for liquidating him . . . Do you think we would have mounted such a special operation to eliminate him . . . with polonium that costs the earth? That we would have spent so much money on him? My God, we could have used the money to increase pensions here at home. If we’d needed to eliminate Litvinenko, we would have done it ages ago.”

I thanked them and switched off the tape recorder. It was the closest I was going to get to an admission that such operations do after all take place. And if they take place, was it not possible that someone had his own reasons to conclude that Litvinenko actually was worth the price of a vial of polonium?

The more I probed, the more I was becoming convinced that Litvinenko had been poisoned by a group of people independent of the Kremlin but with close connections to the Russian security forces.

I knew it was a group with its own reasons to target Litvinenko, a group that could advance FSB interests to justify the murder, interests that would confer at least some immunity on it if the Kremlin were to become aware of what it had done.

How was I to find these men? I sat in my Moscow hotel room, a half empty bottle of vodka in front of me, and picked up the telephone.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

On the Trail of Litvinenko’s Killers

The Litvinenko File by Martin Sixsmith, published today by Macmillan Press, goes on sale today. The Times of London offers readers an extract:

It was six o’clock on a Monday evening and the snowstorm had set in for the day. Cutting down the side of GUM, the Victorian department store that stares across Red Square to the Kremlin, I could see barely 10ft in front of me.

The red brick of the Kremlin wall emerged from the gloom and I was transported back to the first time I had come here, 20 years earlier. Then I was a young reporter with a coveted pass to attend Mikhail Gorbachev’s groundbreaking Congress of People’s Deputies, where democrats slugged it out with communist dinosaurs as Russia engaged in real political debate for the first time.

Now, in 2007, I couldn’t help wondering if much had changed. The welcome at the Spassky Gate was pretty much the same: three uniformed guards with rifles and a metal detector. But they allowed themselves a welcoming smile.

From the shadows a figure called my name. Aleksei was young, slim and cheerily informal. We chatted as we turned into the long yellow-stucco building that houses the presidential administration, the seat of power.

In the lift to the third floor I asked Aleksei who he worked for. The answer was an embarrassed: “Actually I work for the FSB; but don’t worry, I’m not a spy.”

The FSB is the Russian security service, successor to the Soviet KGB. It was about the death of a former member of the FSB that I had come to the Kremlin.

I wanted to know whether President Vladimir Putin, Russia’s most powerful leader since Joseph Stalin, had ordered the agonising death in a London hospital of Alexander Litvinenko. IT is hard to imagine that only five months ago the world had never heard of “Sasha” Litvinenko, the boy from the deep Russian provinces who rose through the ranks of the world’s most feared security service, who alleged murder and corruption in the Russian government, fled to London and took the shilling of Moscow’s avowed enemy before dying in the most sensational of circumstances last November — apparently a martyr in the covert war between the Kremlin and its political opponents.

As a habitué of Russian exile circles in London, I knew who Litvinenko was and that he was closely associated with the kingpin of the exiles, Boris Berezovsky.

Litvinenko’s second wife Marina describes him as boyish and emotional, but she says he had ruthlessness in him too. Even his closest friends say he probably had the blood of more than one victim on his hands. But he dispatched them while carrying out his duty. His constant refrain was that he had always behaved loyally and honestly.

He spent most of his career being loyal to the authorities in his country, whoever they were: first the communists, then Boris Yeltsin’s reformers, then the hardline autocracy imposed by Putin. He used to speak of Putin, a former KGB spy, as his role model, idolising him with an intensity bordering on love. But he was transformed to an acrimonious, diehard foe.

For six years Litvinenko had been venting his bile on Putin from London, hurling ever more outrageous accusations including murder and paedophilia. He had also directed increasingly bitter polemics at his former colleagues in the FSB. He had become involved in murky business dealings, with dark suggestions of blackmail plots. And he had exasperated and finally fallen out with Berezovsky himself.

The details of his death are now known worldwide. The British police have established that — in London on November 1 last year — someone persuaded him to eat or drink a dose of polonium 210, which destroyed his internal organs before doctors could discover what was killing him.

There is overwhelming evidence that Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, former FSB men who met him that day, left a polonium trail all over west London. But there is no evidence that they administered the poison. Nor is there any obvious personal motive for their wanting to kill him.

Many others did have a motive for murder. In the end someone’s patience snapped. So who had the motive, and the means, to carry out what was to all intents and purposes the world’s first act of international nuclear terrorism? The answer lies in the social and political upheaval that brought Putin to power and in the business conflicts, vested interests and political corruption that have divided Russia into warring camps.

In this war each side accuses the other of the darkest acts, sometimes without the slightest basis in fact, and the hand of Putin or Berezovsky is seen behind every evil. Men like Litvinenko have been turned into the expendable pawns of ruthless masters.

As I conducted my research into his background, I was amazed by the life he had led, the risks he had taken and the enemies he had made with such insouciance. His past threw up so many potential reasons for his murder that I was surprised he had survived as long as he did.

The son of a military man, Litvinenko did his military service in an elite division under the command of the KGB and was later invited to join the KGB’s counter-intel-ligence service in the twilight years of the Soviet Union. In the mid1990s, when Chechnya was fighting for independence, he was sent there with the new FSB’s special forces, the Osobysty. He claimed to have experienced an epiphany interrogating a teenage Chechen fighter who told him: “I am not alone; the whole of my class enlisted straight after we graduated from school. We just knew we had to do it . . . for our country.”

There were also less savoury tales of his conduct. His former FSB commander in Chechnya, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Gusak, publicly accused him after he was poisoned last November of having been a torturer, a killer and a coward.

It is indisputable that the FSB committed many atrocities in Chechnya, and some of Litvinenko’s closest friends accept that, as a member of the feared Osobysty, he must have been involved in dirty work.

Gusak, however, is not a disinterested witness. He was intimately linked with an episode that bears directly on Litvinenko’s murder.

AFTER Chechnya, Litvinenko was invited to join a new unit, the Directorate for the Analysis and Suppression of the Activities of Criminal Organisations (URPO), set up to wipe out the crime bosses who were plundering Russia.

In Chechnya, questions of legality and human rights rarely impeded FSB operations. Now the same bespredel (lawlessness within the state) was going to be unleashed in Moscow. Litvinenko would later describe URPO as the “bureau of nonjudicial executions”.

Andrei Nekrasov, a film maker and friend of Litvinenko, told me: “That unit, to be completely frank, was composed of people that the leadership thought were capable of pulling off quite violent operations . . . and never talking about them.”

The director of the FSB at the time, Nikolai Kovalyov, says: “Litvinenko and co supported the creation of so-called White Death Brigades — in plain language, hit squads. Their reasoning was that it was impossible to combat organised crime in Russia with legal methods, so illegal methods would have to be used. That is to say, murders . . .”

In late 1997, URPO was put under the control of a senior FSB colonel, Yevgeny Khokholkov, whom Litvinenko had investigated for connections with drug gangs. Despite a compromising videotape, Khokholkov had kept his job. Disenchantment was sown in Litvinenko’s mind.

It heightened when he was ordered to ambush and beat up Mikhail Trepashkin, an FSB lieutenant-colonel who had been probing allegations that high-ranking officers were involved in serious crime.

Unable to defend himself, the slightly built Trepashkin begged Litvinenko for the chance to explain what he had found out about FSB corruption. Marina Litvinenko says he convinced her husband that things were badly wrong in the FSB and that someone had to do something about it.

The chance to do something soon arose. On December 27 1997, according to Litvinenko, he and four other URPO officers were called into Khokholkov’s office and told to assassinate Boris Berezovsky.

No written order was given. There was clearly a well-established process of deniability in place: such decisions were taken in cosy chats on sofas in private offices with no minutes and no paper trail. This is of crucial importance now in examining the decision-making process behind Litvinenko’s own assassination nearly a decade later.

In 1997 Berezovsky was probably the most powerful man in Russia. He and other postcommunist billion-aires had rescued Yeltsin from defeat in the 1996 presidential elections with unlimited money and media support. In return, Yeltsin had rewarded them with the keys to Russia’s economy, auctioning off state companies at knockdown prices.

Berezovsky was also a media magnate. His real interest, however, was the acquisition of power. He exerted such influence over the weak and chronically drunk president that he was widely regarded as making decisions for him. By the time Litvinenko was ordered to kill him, everyone knew that Berezovsky was a man not to be trifled with.

Litvinenko had an additional problem: he knew Berezovsky well. He had investigated a bomb attack on the rising tycoon in 1994, and they had become friends. The relationship had been cemented when, Berezovsky says, Litvinenko prevented the Moscow police from framing him for the murder of a prominent television presenter. “Alexander really saved my life, there was no doubt about it.”

For two months, Litvinenko and his comrades carefully teased out who was behind the proposed assassination, talking to contacts and sources, trying to discover if its backers were themselves powerful people and whether or not it would be in their own interests to go along with it. They knew a bad call could mean an end to their careers and, quite possibly, their lives.

Concluding that the top people in the FSB didn’t know about the order to kill Berezovsky, they reported it to the director. The move backfired. Khokholkov denied their story, and they were put under investigation.

Meeting secretly, the five men decided to seek protection from their proposed victim. Berezovsky could be a very powerful patron for a group of ambitious FSB officers looking to further their careers. Litvinenko told him the whole story.

“Initially I thought it was just a joke,” says Berezovsky. But he also spotted the potential to get control of the FSB.

He asked Litvinenko to bring the other four men to his office to make a videotape of their allegations. Only three turned up, but on the video one is heard quoting the order they received: “He said to us, ‘If there was an order to knock someone off — sorry, to kill; he said to kill — could you fix it?”

Berezovsky: “To kill me?” Agent: “Yes, of course you.” An FSB man later identified as Alexander Gusak also describes on the tape a face-to-face meeting with Khokholkov where he was asked if he would kill Berezovsky. “I replied that if it was properly sanctioned and had the right stamps — that is, the stamp of the prosecutor’s office and the stamp of our own organisation — and it had the right materials to back it up, I would be ready to kill Berezovsky and anyone else.”

Berezovsky took the incriminating videotape to a rising star in the Kremlin: Vladimir Putin, at the time a presidential aide. Berezovsky considered him a reformer and a friend. They regularly visited each other’s houses and even took skiing holidays together.

At first the ploy seemed to work. Putin took charge of the FSB, and the hated Khokholkov was transferred. Litvinenko thought he would have a big role in a cleaned-up FSB under his hero Putin.

Berezovsky had helped get Putin appointed and now expected him to pay this favour back by installing friendly faces in all the positions of power. If things worked out, the FSB would become a loyal Berezovsky fiefdom for him in the looming power battles over the succession to Yeltsin.

It didn’t work out, however. Putin’s debt of gratitude was small beer compared with the need to look after number one. The Berezovsky camp was just one among several warring Kremlin factions he weighed up to decide where his best interests lay.

To apply pressure on Putin, Berezovsky told Litvinenko and his colleagues to go public with their revelations about the assassination plot in a televised press conference. When some of the shocked agents refused — it was unheard of for FSB men to go public — he told them they had come too far to turn back.

On the eve of the press conference he summoned them to a grey-stuccoed building that had once been the family mansion of the noble Smirnov family. Inside, they were served drinks in Berezovsky’s club, the Logovaz Salon, with its gilded walls, ornate decorations and giant aquarium. Then they were coached on the statements they would be making.

Next day, in front of the cameras, Litvinenko accused his superiors of extortion, kidnappings and murder and, in a not very coded message to Putin, called on the FSB to cleanse itself.

Litvinenko identified himself but the five men with him were not so brave: one wore a ski mask and the others dark glasses. I now believe I know their names, which would recur with ominous regularity in both Litvinenko’s future life and the investigation of his eventual death.

They included Gusak, who would accuse Litvinenko of war crimes in Chechnya; Colonel Viktor Shebalin, who sat next to Litvinenko making an exaggerated show of friendship and support; and Major Andrei Ponkin, who was the only other man to speak. Ponkin alleged, among other things, that he and others had been instructed to kill the dissident former FSB man Mikhail Trepashkin.

Far from being nudged into cooperating, Putin was infuriated. The whistle-blowers were called in by FSB interrogators. Some were threatened, others offered inducements. It was made forcefully clear to them that they had brought shame on the service and the motherland. They could face the prospect of prison, or they could recant and agree to work against the “traitors” who had led them astray.

The question of exactly which of Litvinenko’s comrades succumbed to these blandishments is a vital piece of information for anyone seeking to unravel the events that led to his death.

Marina Litvinenko claims Shebalin was working all along for the FSB as “a provocateur”. Litvinenko’s friend, the historian Yuri Felshtinsky, believes Shebalin, Ponkin and Gusak all took roles in Putin’s subsequent war against Berezovsky and Litvinenko.

From that day on they would have every incentive to silence the increasingly irritating voice of the man they claimed had tricked them into putting their lives and careers on the line.

Events then moved rapidly. Berezovsky slid down the greasy pole of Kremlin politics as Putin rose up it. He was given a ceremonial job that kept him out of Moscow, and in March 1999 he was ousted altogether. Within days Litvinenko was arrested for trumped up petty crimes.

Felshtinsky says that the FSB tried to persuade Litvinenko to cut a deal in the same way that his former colleagues seem to have done. “When he refused . . . the FSB told him, ‘Look. Now you must know the end of the story. The end of the story is that you are going to be killed, or you are going to be put in prison and killed in prison. But you know our organisation: there is no other way. You are going to be killed’.”

He was charged with beating up an arrested terror suspect. To seasoned FSB men this was ridiculous; few could think when arrested terror suspects were not beaten up.

The prosecution produced a grainy video of a blond FSB officer punching a crouching prisoner in the face. The interrogator is wearing a military cap and I certainly could not identify him as being Sasha Litvinenko. He is, however, surrounded by apparent URPO agents.

Two officers who had served with Litvinenko recognised the film and they knew the man in it was not him. They found the original of the tape, which had other footage proving his innocence.

According to Litvinenko’s father, Walter, they were about to produce the tape in court when Litvinenko was threatened in his cell. “The FSB came to him and said, ‘You have a son. If you produce that video in court, you should be very afraid for your son’.”

Even without the video, the military judge threw out the case. But as he did so a team of crack spetsnaz troops — Russia’s SAS — stormed into court and the military prosecutor announced new charges. After another acquittal a third trial was ordered, and harassment continued.

FSB interrogators warned Litvinenko: “If they find you not guilty this time, it’s not you we’ll be talking to; we’ll sort things out with your wife and your kid. You don’t think you’ll get away, do you? You’re a traitor to the system and you’re going to be punished.”

His friend Felshtinksy made an unofficial approach to an FSB general, asking if a deal could perhaps be done for the Litvinenkos to slip quietly into exile abroad. The general replied, “I can honestly tell you there is no way for that man to leave Russia alive. And if ever I meet him again, I will personally kill him with my two hands.”

That, says Marina Litvinenko, is when Sasha made up his mind to flee, as Berezovsky had done. During his personal drama Yeltsin had resigned and Putin was now president.

SEVEN years later, at the end of a wide Kremlin corridor, Aleksei ushered me through an anteroom into the large office of Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s head of information.

Peskov is a sprightly man in his early forties, a career diplomat who enjoys the confidence of the president. Over a cup of hot Georgian tea I tried to gauge if his boss really could have been involved in the Litvinenko poisoning, as the dead man’s friends have claimed, or if the accusations were merely the fabrications or wishful thinking of enemies at home and abroad.

An earnest, sophisticated man, Peskov is far removed from the bullying, stonewalling Soviet officials I used to meet. He comes across as reasonable and sincere in his love for his country and his faith in his president. He knows Putin intimately — he works with him every day — and feels personal resentment on behalf of his boss.

I knew he had discussed the Litvinenko case with Putin at great length and had given him advice on how to remain calm and measured in the face of what the president believed to be an unjustified personal affront against himself.

“You know, I would never discuss that [advice] in public. But nevertheless, what is obvious is that the president felt himself necessary to express his condolences to the family of Litvinenko. He accepted that it was a human tragedy — a man died — but he never tried to camouflage, to hide the fact that he was not fond of Mr Litvinenko. And you will find very few people in my country — including his first wife, by the way, and his two children — who are fond of him or who are proud of him. This is not the case in my country.”

It was a strange sensation, sitting in the heart of the Kremlin discussing the personal feelings of the most powerful man in Russia. Would previous occupants of these quarters have been so open with a foreigner?

I asked how Putin felt about the allegations levelled at him personally, how it felt to be accused of murder. Peskov said he would not discuss such things in public, but I later spoke to another source close to Putin who knew about his feelings.

“The president is very upset by this,” he told me. “He is upset by these accusations made personally about him. He simply can’t believe that people are saying these things about him as a person. He’s very angry about the way the British press has named him as a murderer — that’s why he won’t speak about it any more.”

I asked why, if this was the case, Putin had refrained from expressing his anger and hurt. He told me: “The president doesn’t like his feelings being discussed in public.”

Even if Putin had not personally ordered the Litvinenko killing, it could still have been the unauthorised work of the Russian security services. I asked Peskov if the president had ordered an inquiry to make sure the FSB was not involved.

“Look, I don’t know. I am being very frank with you now. It’s not a question of Putin not being sure if such an involvement was possible or impossible. It is hard for us to imagine that there is the slightest idea that such a possibility could exist. For us the tiniest possibility is out of the question. There is not even the tiniest possibility, not even a hypothetical possibility of our special services being involved.”

Up to now I had been convinced by what I had heard. On the balance of evidence I was coming to the conclusion that Putin himself had had no hand in the murder. But this was something different: Peskov could offer no evidence that ruled out the possibility of a freelance operation, or that suggested Moscow had even tried to rule one out.

When I pressed him he told me: “For that purpose our prosecutor’s office has opened its own investigation.” It was clear where I would have to go.

The office of the prosecutor general of the Russian Federation is set behind a small, anonymous-look-ing wooden door on Bolshaya Dmitrovka, a street behind the Bolshoi theatre. The prosecutor’s office is a powerful institution, combining oversight of policing, investigation and prosecution. The Metropolitan police’s finest visited it two weeks before me, looking for clues in the Litvinenko case.

As in the Kremlin, my reception was warm and friendly. Two young detectives, Sasha and Kolya, walked me upstairs to a cosy, overheated second-floor office. An attractive woman in her mid-thirties introduced herself as Marina Gridneva, senior legal counsel and head of the information division. She introduced another detective, and they produced a teapot and a large sponge cake topped with apricot jam. It was, explained Marina, homemade. With a cup of a very unusual, aromatic tea, I ate two slices.

The charm offensive seemed genuine and they laughed when I said journalists would not get similar treatment from Scotland Yard. But hospitality did not mean they were going to answer my questions. All my inquiries about the possibility of FSB involvement in Litvinenko’s murder were met with a steely: “That is part of an ongoing investigation so we cannot comment.”

After 20 minutes we seemed to be getting nowhere. I decided to be a little provocative. “What about the new laws of July 2006?” I asked. One of them allows the president to use the Russian secret services to eliminate “extremists” in Russia and on foreign territory. And another expands the definition of “extrem-ism” to include anyone “libellously critical of the Russian authorities”?

“It looks like a pretty clear mandate to go out and kill people like Litvinenko, doesn’t it?” I suggested.

The two detectives asked for a moment to consult. They tapped at a computer and phoned for some documents. My tape recorder registered an air of mild panic. Marina’s voice is heard asking me to help myself to some more tea and cake while they sort things out. Then, after a lengthy pause, they are back with the explanation: those laws were not adopted with any evil intent. They were a response to the abduction and murder of five Russian diplomats in Iraq.

It seemed I was going to get nowhere. They had stonewalled me with a charming but immovable double act. So I said, “Okay, thanks very much”, and they clearly thought the interview was over because they started smiling and suddenly became very expansive. Fortunately, my tape was still running to record what came next.

“Look, Martin, do you really think we’d bother assassinating a nobody like Litvinenko? Someone who left the country God knows how long ago? Who was no threat to us and didn’t have any secrets to betray? . . . He just wasn’t important enough. He didn’t know any secrets that would be a reason for liquidating him . . . Do you think we would have mounted such a special operation to eliminate him . . . with polonium that costs the earth? That we would have spent so much money on him? My God, we could have used the money to increase pensions here at home. If we’d needed to eliminate Litvinenko, we would have done it ages ago.”

I thanked them and switched off the tape recorder. It was the closest I was going to get to an admission that such operations do after all take place. And if they take place, was it not possible that someone had his own reasons to conclude that Litvinenko actually was worth the price of a vial of polonium?

The more I probed, the more I was becoming convinced that Litvinenko had been poisoned by a group of people independent of the Kremlin but with close connections to the Russian security forces.

I knew it was a group with its own reasons to target Litvinenko, a group that could advance FSB interests to justify the murder, interests that would confer at least some immunity on it if the Kremlin were to become aware of what it had done.

How was I to find these men? I sat in my Moscow hotel room, a half empty bottle of vodka in front of me, and picked up the telephone.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

On the Trail of Litvinenko’s Killers

The Litvinenko File by Martin Sixsmith, published today by Macmillan Press, goes on sale today. The Times of London offers readers an extract:

It was six o’clock on a Monday evening and the snowstorm had set in for the day. Cutting down the side of GUM, the Victorian department store that stares across Red Square to the Kremlin, I could see barely 10ft in front of me.

The red brick of the Kremlin wall emerged from the gloom and I was transported back to the first time I had come here, 20 years earlier. Then I was a young reporter with a coveted pass to attend Mikhail Gorbachev’s groundbreaking Congress of People’s Deputies, where democrats slugged it out with communist dinosaurs as Russia engaged in real political debate for the first time.

Now, in 2007, I couldn’t help wondering if much had changed. The welcome at the Spassky Gate was pretty much the same: three uniformed guards with rifles and a metal detector. But they allowed themselves a welcoming smile.

From the shadows a figure called my name. Aleksei was young, slim and cheerily informal. We chatted as we turned into the long yellow-stucco building that houses the presidential administration, the seat of power.

In the lift to the third floor I asked Aleksei who he worked for. The answer was an embarrassed: “Actually I work for the FSB; but don’t worry, I’m not a spy.”

The FSB is the Russian security service, successor to the Soviet KGB. It was about the death of a former member of the FSB that I had come to the Kremlin.

I wanted to know whether President Vladimir Putin, Russia’s most powerful leader since Joseph Stalin, had ordered the agonising death in a London hospital of Alexander Litvinenko. IT is hard to imagine that only five months ago the world had never heard of “Sasha” Litvinenko, the boy from the deep Russian provinces who rose through the ranks of the world’s most feared security service, who alleged murder and corruption in the Russian government, fled to London and took the shilling of Moscow’s avowed enemy before dying in the most sensational of circumstances last November — apparently a martyr in the covert war between the Kremlin and its political opponents.

As a habitué of Russian exile circles in London, I knew who Litvinenko was and that he was closely associated with the kingpin of the exiles, Boris Berezovsky.

Litvinenko’s second wife Marina describes him as boyish and emotional, but she says he had ruthlessness in him too. Even his closest friends say he probably had the blood of more than one victim on his hands. But he dispatched them while carrying out his duty. His constant refrain was that he had always behaved loyally and honestly.

He spent most of his career being loyal to the authorities in his country, whoever they were: first the communists, then Boris Yeltsin’s reformers, then the hardline autocracy imposed by Putin. He used to speak of Putin, a former KGB spy, as his role model, idolising him with an intensity bordering on love. But he was transformed to an acrimonious, diehard foe.

For six years Litvinenko had been venting his bile on Putin from London, hurling ever more outrageous accusations including murder and paedophilia. He had also directed increasingly bitter polemics at his former colleagues in the FSB. He had become involved in murky business dealings, with dark suggestions of blackmail plots. And he had exasperated and finally fallen out with Berezovsky himself.

The details of his death are now known worldwide. The British police have established that — in London on November 1 last year — someone persuaded him to eat or drink a dose of polonium 210, which destroyed his internal organs before doctors could discover what was killing him.

There is overwhelming evidence that Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, former FSB men who met him that day, left a polonium trail all over west London. But there is no evidence that they administered the poison. Nor is there any obvious personal motive for their wanting to kill him.

Many others did have a motive for murder. In the end someone’s patience snapped. So who had the motive, and the means, to carry out what was to all intents and purposes the world’s first act of international nuclear terrorism? The answer lies in the social and political upheaval that brought Putin to power and in the business conflicts, vested interests and political corruption that have divided Russia into warring camps.

In this war each side accuses the other of the darkest acts, sometimes without the slightest basis in fact, and the hand of Putin or Berezovsky is seen behind every evil. Men like Litvinenko have been turned into the expendable pawns of ruthless masters.

As I conducted my research into his background, I was amazed by the life he had led, the risks he had taken and the enemies he had made with such insouciance. His past threw up so many potential reasons for his murder that I was surprised he had survived as long as he did.

The son of a military man, Litvinenko did his military service in an elite division under the command of the KGB and was later invited to join the KGB’s counter-intel-ligence service in the twilight years of the Soviet Union. In the mid1990s, when Chechnya was fighting for independence, he was sent there with the new FSB’s special forces, the Osobysty. He claimed to have experienced an epiphany interrogating a teenage Chechen fighter who told him: “I am not alone; the whole of my class enlisted straight after we graduated from school. We just knew we had to do it . . . for our country.”

There were also less savoury tales of his conduct. His former FSB commander in Chechnya, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Gusak, publicly accused him after he was poisoned last November of having been a torturer, a killer and a coward.

It is indisputable that the FSB committed many atrocities in Chechnya, and some of Litvinenko’s closest friends accept that, as a member of the feared Osobysty, he must have been involved in dirty work.

Gusak, however, is not a disinterested witness. He was intimately linked with an episode that bears directly on Litvinenko’s murder.

AFTER Chechnya, Litvinenko was invited to join a new unit, the Directorate for the Analysis and Suppression of the Activities of Criminal Organisations (URPO), set up to wipe out the crime bosses who were plundering Russia.

In Chechnya, questions of legality and human rights rarely impeded FSB operations. Now the same bespredel (lawlessness within the state) was going to be unleashed in Moscow. Litvinenko would later describe URPO as the “bureau of nonjudicial executions”.

Andrei Nekrasov, a film maker and friend of Litvinenko, told me: “That unit, to be completely frank, was composed of people that the leadership thought were capable of pulling off quite violent operations . . . and never talking about them.”

The director of the FSB at the time, Nikolai Kovalyov, says: “Litvinenko and co supported the creation of so-called White Death Brigades — in plain language, hit squads. Their reasoning was that it was impossible to combat organised crime in Russia with legal methods, so illegal methods would have to be used. That is to say, murders . . .”

In late 1997, URPO was put under the control of a senior FSB colonel, Yevgeny Khokholkov, whom Litvinenko had investigated for connections with drug gangs. Despite a compromising videotape, Khokholkov had kept his job. Disenchantment was sown in Litvinenko’s mind.

It heightened when he was ordered to ambush and beat up Mikhail Trepashkin, an FSB lieutenant-colonel who had been probing allegations that high-ranking officers were involved in serious crime.

Unable to defend himself, the slightly built Trepashkin begged Litvinenko for the chance to explain what he had found out about FSB corruption. Marina Litvinenko says he convinced her husband that things were badly wrong in the FSB and that someone had to do something about it.

The chance to do something soon arose. On December 27 1997, according to Litvinenko, he and four other URPO officers were called into Khokholkov’s office and told to assassinate Boris Berezovsky.

No written order was given. There was clearly a well-established process of deniability in place: such decisions were taken in cosy chats on sofas in private offices with no minutes and no paper trail. This is of crucial importance now in examining the decision-making process behind Litvinenko’s own assassination nearly a decade later.

In 1997 Berezovsky was probably the most powerful man in Russia. He and other postcommunist billion-aires had rescued Yeltsin from defeat in the 1996 presidential elections with unlimited money and media support. In return, Yeltsin had rewarded them with the keys to Russia’s economy, auctioning off state companies at knockdown prices.

Berezovsky was also a media magnate. His real interest, however, was the acquisition of power. He exerted such influence over the weak and chronically drunk president that he was widely regarded as making decisions for him. By the time Litvinenko was ordered to kill him, everyone knew that Berezovsky was a man not to be trifled with.

Litvinenko had an additional problem: he knew Berezovsky well. He had investigated a bomb attack on the rising tycoon in 1994, and they had become friends. The relationship had been cemented when, Berezovsky says, Litvinenko prevented the Moscow police from framing him for the murder of a prominent television presenter. “Alexander really saved my life, there was no doubt about it.”

For two months, Litvinenko and his comrades carefully teased out who was behind the proposed assassination, talking to contacts and sources, trying to discover if its backers were themselves powerful people and whether or not it would be in their own interests to go along with it. They knew a bad call could mean an end to their careers and, quite possibly, their lives.

Concluding that the top people in the FSB didn’t know about the order to kill Berezovsky, they reported it to the director. The move backfired. Khokholkov denied their story, and they were put under investigation.

Meeting secretly, the five men decided to seek protection from their proposed victim. Berezovsky could be a very powerful patron for a group of ambitious FSB officers looking to further their careers. Litvinenko told him the whole story.

“Initially I thought it was just a joke,” says Berezovsky. But he also spotted the potential to get control of the FSB.

He asked Litvinenko to bring the other four men to his office to make a videotape of their allegations. Only three turned up, but on the video one is heard quoting the order they received: “He said to us, ‘If there was an order to knock someone off — sorry, to kill; he said to kill — could you fix it?”

Berezovsky: “To kill me?” Agent: “Yes, of course you.” An FSB man later identified as Alexander Gusak also describes on the tape a face-to-face meeting with Khokholkov where he was asked if he would kill Berezovsky. “I replied that if it was properly sanctioned and had the right stamps — that is, the stamp of the prosecutor’s office and the stamp of our own organisation — and it had the right materials to back it up, I would be ready to kill Berezovsky and anyone else.”

Berezovsky took the incriminating videotape to a rising star in the Kremlin: Vladimir Putin, at the time a presidential aide. Berezovsky considered him a reformer and a friend. They regularly visited each other’s houses and even took skiing holidays together.

At first the ploy seemed to work. Putin took charge of the FSB, and the hated Khokholkov was transferred. Litvinenko thought he would have a big role in a cleaned-up FSB under his hero Putin.

Berezovsky had helped get Putin appointed and now expected him to pay this favour back by installing friendly faces in all the positions of power. If things worked out, the FSB would become a loyal Berezovsky fiefdom for him in the looming power battles over the succession to Yeltsin.

It didn’t work out, however. Putin’s debt of gratitude was small beer compared with the need to look after number one. The Berezovsky camp was just one among several warring Kremlin factions he weighed up to decide where his best interests lay.

To apply pressure on Putin, Berezovsky told Litvinenko and his colleagues to go public with their revelations about the assassination plot in a televised press conference. When some of the shocked agents refused — it was unheard of for FSB men to go public — he told them they had come too far to turn back.

On the eve of the press conference he summoned them to a grey-stuccoed building that had once been the family mansion of the noble Smirnov family. Inside, they were served drinks in Berezovsky’s club, the Logovaz Salon, with its gilded walls, ornate decorations and giant aquarium. Then they were coached on the statements they would be making.

Next day, in front of the cameras, Litvinenko accused his superiors of extortion, kidnappings and murder and, in a not very coded message to Putin, called on the FSB to cleanse itself.

Litvinenko identified himself but the five men with him were not so brave: one wore a ski mask and the others dark glasses. I now believe I know their names, which would recur with ominous regularity in both Litvinenko’s future life and the investigation of his eventual death.

They included Gusak, who would accuse Litvinenko of war crimes in Chechnya; Colonel Viktor Shebalin, who sat next to Litvinenko making an exaggerated show of friendship and support; and Major Andrei Ponkin, who was the only other man to speak. Ponkin alleged, among other things, that he and others had been instructed to kill the dissident former FSB man Mikhail Trepashkin.

Far from being nudged into cooperating, Putin was infuriated. The whistle-blowers were called in by FSB interrogators. Some were threatened, others offered inducements. It was made forcefully clear to them that they had brought shame on the service and the motherland. They could face the prospect of prison, or they could recant and agree to work against the “traitors” who had led them astray.

The question of exactly which of Litvinenko’s comrades succumbed to these blandishments is a vital piece of information for anyone seeking to unravel the events that led to his death.

Marina Litvinenko claims Shebalin was working all along for the FSB as “a provocateur”. Litvinenko’s friend, the historian Yuri Felshtinsky, believes Shebalin, Ponkin and Gusak all took roles in Putin’s subsequent war against Berezovsky and Litvinenko.

From that day on they would have every incentive to silence the increasingly irritating voice of the man they claimed had tricked them into putting their lives and careers on the line.

Events then moved rapidly. Berezovsky slid down the greasy pole of Kremlin politics as Putin rose up it. He was given a ceremonial job that kept him out of Moscow, and in March 1999 he was ousted altogether. Within days Litvinenko was arrested for trumped up petty crimes.

Felshtinsky says that the FSB tried to persuade Litvinenko to cut a deal in the same way that his former colleagues seem to have done. “When he refused . . . the FSB told him, ‘Look. Now you must know the end of the story. The end of the story is that you are going to be killed, or you are going to be put in prison and killed in prison. But you know our organisation: there is no other way. You are going to be killed’.”

He was charged with beating up an arrested terror suspect. To seasoned FSB men this was ridiculous; few could think when arrested terror suspects were not beaten up.

The prosecution produced a grainy video of a blond FSB officer punching a crouching prisoner in the face. The interrogator is wearing a military cap and I certainly could not identify him as being Sasha Litvinenko. He is, however, surrounded by apparent URPO agents.

Two officers who had served with Litvinenko recognised the film and they knew the man in it was not him. They found the original of the tape, which had other footage proving his innocence.

According to Litvinenko’s father, Walter, they were about to produce the tape in court when Litvinenko was threatened in his cell. “The FSB came to him and said, ‘You have a son. If you produce that video in court, you should be very afraid for your son’.”

Even without the video, the military judge threw out the case. But as he did so a team of crack spetsnaz troops — Russia’s SAS — stormed into court and the military prosecutor announced new charges. After another acquittal a third trial was ordered, and harassment continued.

FSB interrogators warned Litvinenko: “If they find you not guilty this time, it’s not you we’ll be talking to; we’ll sort things out with your wife and your kid. You don’t think you’ll get away, do you? You’re a traitor to the system and you’re going to be punished.”

His friend Felshtinksy made an unofficial approach to an FSB general, asking if a deal could perhaps be done for the Litvinenkos to slip quietly into exile abroad. The general replied, “I can honestly tell you there is no way for that man to leave Russia alive. And if ever I meet him again, I will personally kill him with my two hands.”

That, says Marina Litvinenko, is when Sasha made up his mind to flee, as Berezovsky had done. During his personal drama Yeltsin had resigned and Putin was now president.

SEVEN years later, at the end of a wide Kremlin corridor, Aleksei ushered me through an anteroom into the large office of Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s head of information.

Peskov is a sprightly man in his early forties, a career diplomat who enjoys the confidence of the president. Over a cup of hot Georgian tea I tried to gauge if his boss really could have been involved in the Litvinenko poisoning, as the dead man’s friends have claimed, or if the accusations were merely the fabrications or wishful thinking of enemies at home and abroad.

An earnest, sophisticated man, Peskov is far removed from the bullying, stonewalling Soviet officials I used to meet. He comes across as reasonable and sincere in his love for his country and his faith in his president. He knows Putin intimately — he works with him every day — and feels personal resentment on behalf of his boss.

I knew he had discussed the Litvinenko case with Putin at great length and had given him advice on how to remain calm and measured in the face of what the president believed to be an unjustified personal affront against himself.

“You know, I would never discuss that [advice] in public. But nevertheless, what is obvious is that the president felt himself necessary to express his condolences to the family of Litvinenko. He accepted that it was a human tragedy — a man died — but he never tried to camouflage, to hide the fact that he was not fond of Mr Litvinenko. And you will find very few people in my country — including his first wife, by the way, and his two children — who are fond of him or who are proud of him. This is not the case in my country.”

It was a strange sensation, sitting in the heart of the Kremlin discussing the personal feelings of the most powerful man in Russia. Would previous occupants of these quarters have been so open with a foreigner?

I asked how Putin felt about the allegations levelled at him personally, how it felt to be accused of murder. Peskov said he would not discuss such things in public, but I later spoke to another source close to Putin who knew about his feelings.

“The president is very upset by this,” he told me. “He is upset by these accusations made personally about him. He simply can’t believe that people are saying these things about him as a person. He’s very angry about the way the British press has named him as a murderer — that’s why he won’t speak about it any more.”

I asked why, if this was the case, Putin had refrained from expressing his anger and hurt. He told me: “The president doesn’t like his feelings being discussed in public.”

Even if Putin had not personally ordered the Litvinenko killing, it could still have been the unauthorised work of the Russian security services. I asked Peskov if the president had ordered an inquiry to make sure the FSB was not involved.

“Look, I don’t know. I am being very frank with you now. It’s not a question of Putin not being sure if such an involvement was possible or impossible. It is hard for us to imagine that there is the slightest idea that such a possibility could exist. For us the tiniest possibility is out of the question. There is not even the tiniest possibility, not even a hypothetical possibility of our special services being involved.”

Up to now I had been convinced by what I had heard. On the balance of evidence I was coming to the conclusion that Putin himself had had no hand in the murder. But this was something different: Peskov could offer no evidence that ruled out the possibility of a freelance operation, or that suggested Moscow had even tried to rule one out.

When I pressed him he told me: “For that purpose our prosecutor’s office has opened its own investigation.” It was clear where I would have to go.

The office of the prosecutor general of the Russian Federation is set behind a small, anonymous-look-ing wooden door on Bolshaya Dmitrovka, a street behind the Bolshoi theatre. The prosecutor’s office is a powerful institution, combining oversight of policing, investigation and prosecution. The Metropolitan police’s finest visited it two weeks before me, looking for clues in the Litvinenko case.

As in the Kremlin, my reception was warm and friendly. Two young detectives, Sasha and Kolya, walked me upstairs to a cosy, overheated second-floor office. An attractive woman in her mid-thirties introduced herself as Marina Gridneva, senior legal counsel and head of the information division. She introduced another detective, and they produced a teapot and a large sponge cake topped with apricot jam. It was, explained Marina, homemade. With a cup of a very unusual, aromatic tea, I ate two slices.

The charm offensive seemed genuine and they laughed when I said journalists would not get similar treatment from Scotland Yard. But hospitality did not mean they were going to answer my questions. All my inquiries about the possibility of FSB involvement in Litvinenko’s murder were met with a steely: “That is part of an ongoing investigation so we cannot comment.”

After 20 minutes we seemed to be getting nowhere. I decided to be a little provocative. “What about the new laws of July 2006?” I asked. One of them allows the president to use the Russian secret services to eliminate “extremists” in Russia and on foreign territory. And another expands the definition of “extrem-ism” to include anyone “libellously critical of the Russian authorities”?

“It looks like a pretty clear mandate to go out and kill people like Litvinenko, doesn’t it?” I suggested.

The two detectives asked for a moment to consult. They tapped at a computer and phoned for some documents. My tape recorder registered an air of mild panic. Marina’s voice is heard asking me to help myself to some more tea and cake while they sort things out. Then, after a lengthy pause, they are back with the explanation: those laws were not adopted with any evil intent. They were a response to the abduction and murder of five Russian diplomats in Iraq.

It seemed I was going to get nowhere. They had stonewalled me with a charming but immovable double act. So I said, “Okay, thanks very much”, and they clearly thought the interview was over because they started smiling and suddenly became very expansive. Fortunately, my tape was still running to record what came next.

“Look, Martin, do you really think we’d bother assassinating a nobody like Litvinenko? Someone who left the country God knows how long ago? Who was no threat to us and didn’t have any secrets to betray? . . . He just wasn’t important enough. He didn’t know any secrets that would be a reason for liquidating him . . . Do you think we would have mounted such a special operation to eliminate him . . . with polonium that costs the earth? That we would have spent so much money on him? My God, we could have used the money to increase pensions here at home. If we’d needed to eliminate Litvinenko, we would have done it ages ago.”

I thanked them and switched off the tape recorder. It was the closest I was going to get to an admission that such operations do after all take place. And if they take place, was it not possible that someone had his own reasons to conclude that Litvinenko actually was worth the price of a vial of polonium?

The more I probed, the more I was becoming convinced that Litvinenko had been poisoned by a group of people independent of the Kremlin but with close connections to the Russian security forces.

I knew it was a group with its own reasons to target Litvinenko, a group that could advance FSB interests to justify the murder, interests that would confer at least some immunity on it if the Kremlin were to become aware of what it had done.

How was I to find these men? I sat in my Moscow hotel room, a half empty bottle of vodka in front of me, and picked up the telephone.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

On the Trail of Litvinenko’s Killers

The Litvinenko File by Martin Sixsmith, published today by Macmillan Press, goes on sale today. The Times of London offers readers an extract:

It was six o’clock on a Monday evening and the snowstorm had set in for the day. Cutting down the side of GUM, the Victorian department store that stares across Red Square to the Kremlin, I could see barely 10ft in front of me.

The red brick of the Kremlin wall emerged from the gloom and I was transported back to the first time I had come here, 20 years earlier. Then I was a young reporter with a coveted pass to attend Mikhail Gorbachev’s groundbreaking Congress of People’s Deputies, where democrats slugged it out with communist dinosaurs as Russia engaged in real political debate for the first time.

Now, in 2007, I couldn’t help wondering if much had changed. The welcome at the Spassky Gate was pretty much the same: three uniformed guards with rifles and a metal detector. But they allowed themselves a welcoming smile.

From the shadows a figure called my name. Aleksei was young, slim and cheerily informal. We chatted as we turned into the long yellow-stucco building that houses the presidential administration, the seat of power.

In the lift to the third floor I asked Aleksei who he worked for. The answer was an embarrassed: “Actually I work for the FSB; but don’t worry, I’m not a spy.”

The FSB is the Russian security service, successor to the Soviet KGB. It was about the death of a former member of the FSB that I had come to the Kremlin.

I wanted to know whether President Vladimir Putin, Russia’s most powerful leader since Joseph Stalin, had ordered the agonising death in a London hospital of Alexander Litvinenko. IT is hard to imagine that only five months ago the world had never heard of “Sasha” Litvinenko, the boy from the deep Russian provinces who rose through the ranks of the world’s most feared security service, who alleged murder and corruption in the Russian government, fled to London and took the shilling of Moscow’s avowed enemy before dying in the most sensational of circumstances last November — apparently a martyr in the covert war between the Kremlin and its political opponents.

As a habitué of Russian exile circles in London, I knew who Litvinenko was and that he was closely associated with the kingpin of the exiles, Boris Berezovsky.

Litvinenko’s second wife Marina describes him as boyish and emotional, but she says he had ruthlessness in him too. Even his closest friends say he probably had the blood of more than one victim on his hands. But he dispatched them while carrying out his duty. His constant refrain was that he had always behaved loyally and honestly.

He spent most of his career being loyal to the authorities in his country, whoever they were: first the communists, then Boris Yeltsin’s reformers, then the hardline autocracy imposed by Putin. He used to speak of Putin, a former KGB spy, as his role model, idolising him with an intensity bordering on love. But he was transformed to an acrimonious, diehard foe.

For six years Litvinenko had been venting his bile on Putin from London, hurling ever more outrageous accusations including murder and paedophilia. He had also directed increasingly bitter polemics at his former colleagues in the FSB. He had become involved in murky business dealings, with dark suggestions of blackmail plots. And he had exasperated and finally fallen out with Berezovsky himself.

The details of his death are now known worldwide. The British police have established that — in London on November 1 last year — someone persuaded him to eat or drink a dose of polonium 210, which destroyed his internal organs before doctors could discover what was killing him.

There is overwhelming evidence that Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, former FSB men who met him that day, left a polonium trail all over west London. But there is no evidence that they administered the poison. Nor is there any obvious personal motive for their wanting to kill him.

Many others did have a motive for murder. In the end someone’s patience snapped. So who had the motive, and the means, to carry out what was to all intents and purposes the world’s first act of international nuclear terrorism? The answer lies in the social and political upheaval that brought Putin to power and in the business conflicts, vested interests and political corruption that have divided Russia into warring camps.

In this war each side accuses the other of the darkest acts, sometimes without the slightest basis in fact, and the hand of Putin or Berezovsky is seen behind every evil. Men like Litvinenko have been turned into the expendable pawns of ruthless masters.

As I conducted my research into his background, I was amazed by the life he had led, the risks he had taken and the enemies he had made with such insouciance. His past threw up so many potential reasons for his murder that I was surprised he had survived as long as he did.

The son of a military man, Litvinenko did his military service in an elite division under the command of the KGB and was later invited to join the KGB’s counter-intel-ligence service in the twilight years of the Soviet Union. In the mid1990s, when Chechnya was fighting for independence, he was sent there with the new FSB’s special forces, the Osobysty. He claimed to have experienced an epiphany interrogating a teenage Chechen fighter who told him: “I am not alone; the whole of my class enlisted straight after we graduated from school. We just knew we had to do it . . . for our country.”

There were also less savoury tales of his conduct. His former FSB commander in Chechnya, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Gusak, publicly accused him after he was poisoned last November of having been a torturer, a killer and a coward.

It is indisputable that the FSB committed many atrocities in Chechnya, and some of Litvinenko’s closest friends accept that, as a member of the feared Osobysty, he must have been involved in dirty work.

Gusak, however, is not a disinterested witness. He was intimately linked with an episode that bears directly on Litvinenko’s murder.

AFTER Chechnya, Litvinenko was invited to join a new unit, the Directorate for the Analysis and Suppression of the Activities of Criminal Organisations (URPO), set up to wipe out the crime bosses who were plundering Russia.

In Chechnya, questions of legality and human rights rarely impeded FSB operations. Now the same bespredel (lawlessness within the state) was going to be unleashed in Moscow. Litvinenko would later describe URPO as the “bureau of nonjudicial executions”.

Andrei Nekrasov, a film maker and friend of Litvinenko, told me: “That unit, to be completely frank, was composed of people that the leadership thought were capable of pulling off quite violent operations . . . and never talking about them.”

The director of the FSB at the time, Nikolai Kovalyov, says: “Litvinenko and co supported the creation of so-called White Death Brigades — in plain language, hit squads. Their reasoning was that it was impossible to combat organised crime in Russia with legal methods, so illegal methods would have to be used. That is to say, murders . . .”

In late 1997, URPO was put under the control of a senior FSB colonel, Yevgeny Khokholkov, whom Litvinenko had investigated for connections with drug gangs. Despite a compromising videotape, Khokholkov had kept his job. Disenchantment was sown in Litvinenko’s mind.

It heightened when he was ordered to ambush and beat up Mikhail Trepashkin, an FSB lieutenant-colonel who had been probing allegations that high-ranking officers were involved in serious crime.

Unable to defend himself, the slightly built Trepashkin begged Litvinenko for the chance to explain what he had found out about FSB corruption. Marina Litvinenko says he convinced her husband that things were badly wrong in the FSB and that someone had to do something about it.

The chance to do something soon arose. On December 27 1997, according to Litvinenko, he and four other URPO officers were called into Khokholkov’s office and told to assassinate Boris Berezovsky.

No written order was given. There was clearly a well-established process of deniability in place: such decisions were taken in cosy chats on sofas in private offices with no minutes and no paper trail. This is of crucial importance now in examining the decision-making process behind Litvinenko’s own assassination nearly a decade later.

In 1997 Berezovsky was probably the most powerful man in Russia. He and other postcommunist billion-aires had rescued Yeltsin from defeat in the 1996 presidential elections with unlimited money and media support. In return, Yeltsin had rewarded them with the keys to Russia’s economy, auctioning off state companies at knockdown prices.

Berezovsky was also a media magnate. His real interest, however, was the acquisition of power. He exerted such influence over the weak and chronically drunk president that he was widely regarded as making decisions for him. By the time Litvinenko was ordered to kill him, everyone knew that Berezovsky was a man not to be trifled with.

Litvinenko had an additional problem: he knew Berezovsky well. He had investigated a bomb attack on the rising tycoon in 1994, and they had become friends. The relationship had been cemented when, Berezovsky says, Litvinenko prevented the Moscow police from framing him for the murder of a prominent television presenter. “Alexander really saved my life, there was no doubt about it.”

For two months, Litvinenko and his comrades carefully teased out who was behind the proposed assassination, talking to contacts and sources, trying to discover if its backers were themselves powerful people and whether or not it would be in their own interests to go along with it. They knew a bad call could mean an end to their careers and, quite possibly, their lives.

Concluding that the top people in the FSB didn’t know about the order to kill Berezovsky, they reported it to the director. The move backfired. Khokholkov denied their story, and they were put under investigation.

Meeting secretly, the five men decided to seek protection from their proposed victim. Berezovsky could be a very powerful patron for a group of ambitious FSB officers looking to further their careers. Litvinenko told him the whole story.

“Initially I thought it was just a joke,” says Berezovsky. But he also spotted the potential to get control of the FSB.

He asked Litvinenko to bring the other four men to his office to make a videotape of their allegations. Only three turned up, but on the video one is heard quoting the order they received: “He said to us, ‘If there was an order to knock someone off — sorry, to kill; he said to kill — could you fix it?”

Berezovsky: “To kill me?” Agent: “Yes, of course you.” An FSB man later identified as Alexander Gusak also describes on the tape a face-to-face meeting with Khokholkov where he was asked if he would kill Berezovsky. “I replied that if it was properly sanctioned and had the right stamps — that is, the stamp of the prosecutor’s office and the stamp of our own organisation — and it had the right materials to back it up, I would be ready to kill Berezovsky and anyone else.”

Berezovsky took the incriminating videotape to a rising star in the Kremlin: Vladimir Putin, at the time a presidential aide. Berezovsky considered him a reformer and a friend. They regularly visited each other’s houses and even took skiing holidays together.

At first the ploy seemed to work. Putin took charge of the FSB, and the hated Khokholkov was transferred. Litvinenko thought he would have a big role in a cleaned-up FSB under his hero Putin.

Berezovsky had helped get Putin appointed and now expected him to pay this favour back by installing friendly faces in all the positions of power. If things worked out, the FSB would become a loyal Berezovsky fiefdom for him in the looming power battles over the succession to Yeltsin.

It didn’t work out, however. Putin’s debt of gratitude was small beer compared with the need to look after number one. The Berezovsky camp was just one among several warring Kremlin factions he weighed up to decide where his best interests lay.

To apply pressure on Putin, Berezovsky told Litvinenko and his colleagues to go public with their revelations about the assassination plot in a televised press conference. When some of the shocked agents refused — it was unheard of for FSB men to go public — he told them they had come too far to turn back.

On the eve of the press conference he summoned them to a grey-stuccoed building that had once been the family mansion of the noble Smirnov family. Inside, they were served drinks in Berezovsky’s club, the Logovaz Salon, with its gilded walls, ornate decorations and giant aquarium. Then they were coached on the statements they would be making.

Next day, in front of the cameras, Litvinenko accused his superiors of extortion, kidnappings and murder and, in a not very coded message to Putin, called on the FSB to cleanse itself.

Litvinenko identified himself but the five men with him were not so brave: one wore a ski mask and the others dark glasses. I now believe I know their names, which would recur with ominous regularity in both Litvinenko’s future life and the investigation of his eventual death.

They included Gusak, who would accuse Litvinenko of war crimes in Chechnya; Colonel Viktor Shebalin, who sat next to Litvinenko making an exaggerated show of friendship and support; and Major Andrei Ponkin, who was the only other man to speak. Ponkin alleged, among other things, that he and others had been instructed to kill the dissident former FSB man Mikhail Trepashkin.

Far from being nudged into cooperating, Putin was infuriated. The whistle-blowers were called in by FSB interrogators. Some were threatened, others offered inducements. It was made forcefully clear to them that they had brought shame on the service and the motherland. They could face the prospect of prison, or they could recant and agree to work against the “traitors” who had led them astray.

The question of exactly which of Litvinenko’s comrades succumbed to these blandishments is a vital piece of information for anyone seeking to unravel the events that led to his death.

Marina Litvinenko claims Shebalin was working all along for the FSB as “a provocateur”. Litvinenko’s friend, the historian Yuri Felshtinsky, believes Shebalin, Ponkin and Gusak all took roles in Putin’s subsequent war against Berezovsky and Litvinenko.

From that day on they would have every incentive to silence the increasingly irritating voice of the man they claimed had tricked them into putting their lives and careers on the line.

Events then moved rapidly. Berezovsky slid down the greasy pole of Kremlin politics as Putin rose up it. He was given a ceremonial job that kept him out of Moscow, and in March 1999 he was ousted altogether. Within days Litvinenko was arrested for trumped up petty crimes.

Felshtinsky says that the FSB tried to persuade Litvinenko to cut a deal in the same way that his former colleagues seem to have done. “When he refused . . . the FSB told him, ‘Look. Now you must know the end of the story. The end of the story is that you are going to be killed, or you are going to be put in prison and killed in prison. But you know our organisation: there is no other way. You are going to be killed’.”

He was charged with beating up an arrested terror suspect. To seasoned FSB men this was ridiculous; few could think when arrested terror suspects were not beaten up.

The prosecution produced a grainy video of a blond FSB officer punching a crouching prisoner in the face. The interrogator is wearing a military cap and I certainly could not identify him as being Sasha Litvinenko. He is, however, surrounded by apparent URPO agents.

Two officers who had served with Litvinenko recognised the film and they knew the man in it was not him. They found the original of the tape, which had other footage proving his innocence.

According to Litvinenko’s father, Walter, they were about to produce the tape in court when Litvinenko was threatened in his cell. “The FSB came to him and said, ‘You have a son. If you produce that video in court, you should be very afraid for your son’.”

Even without the video, the military judge threw out the case. But as he did so a team of crack spetsnaz troops — Russia’s SAS — stormed into court and the military prosecutor announced new charges. After another acquittal a third trial was ordered, and harassment continued.

FSB interrogators warned Litvinenko: “If they find you not guilty this time, it’s not you we’ll be talking to; we’ll sort things out with your wife and your kid. You don’t think you’ll get away, do you? You’re a traitor to the system and you’re going to be punished.”

His friend Felshtinksy made an unofficial approach to an FSB general, asking if a deal could perhaps be done for the Litvinenkos to slip quietly into exile abroad. The general replied, “I can honestly tell you there is no way for that man to leave Russia alive. And if ever I meet him again, I will personally kill him with my two hands.”

That, says Marina Litvinenko, is when Sasha made up his mind to flee, as Berezovsky had done. During his personal drama Yeltsin had resigned and Putin was now president.

SEVEN years later, at the end of a wide Kremlin corridor, Aleksei ushered me through an anteroom into the large office of Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s head of information.

Peskov is a sprightly man in his early forties, a career diplomat who enjoys the confidence of the president. Over a cup of hot Georgian tea I tried to gauge if his boss really could have been involved in the Litvinenko poisoning, as the dead man’s friends have claimed, or if the accusations were merely the fabrications or wishful thinking of enemies at home and abroad.

An earnest, sophisticated man, Peskov is far removed from the bullying, stonewalling Soviet officials I used to meet. He comes across as reasonable and sincere in his love for his country and his faith in his president. He knows Putin intimately — he works with him every day — and feels personal resentment on behalf of his boss.

I knew he had discussed the Litvinenko case with Putin at great length and had given him advice on how to remain calm and measured in the face of what the president believed to be an unjustified personal affront against himself.

“You know, I would never discuss that [advice] in public. But nevertheless, what is obvious is that the president felt himself necessary to express his condolences to the family of Litvinenko. He accepted that it was a human tragedy — a man died — but he never tried to camouflage, to hide the fact that he was not fond of Mr Litvinenko. And you will find very few people in my country — including his first wife, by the way, and his two children — who are fond of him or who are proud of him. This is not the case in my country.”

It was a strange sensation, sitting in the heart of the Kremlin discussing the personal feelings of the most powerful man in Russia. Would previous occupants of these quarters have been so open with a foreigner?

I asked how Putin felt about the allegations levelled at him personally, how it felt to be accused of murder. Peskov said he would not discuss such things in public, but I later spoke to another source close to Putin who knew about his feelings.

“The president is very upset by this,” he told me. “He is upset by these accusations made personally about him. He simply can’t believe that people are saying these things about him as a person. He’s very angry about the way the British press has named him as a murderer — that’s why he won’t speak about it any more.”

I asked why, if this was the case, Putin had refrained from expressing his anger and hurt. He told me: “The president doesn’t like his feelings being discussed in public.”

Even if Putin had not personally ordered the Litvinenko killing, it could still have been the unauthorised work of the Russian security services. I asked Peskov if the president had ordered an inquiry to make sure the FSB was not involved.

“Look, I don’t know. I am being very frank with you now. It’s not a question of Putin not being sure if such an involvement was possible or impossible. It is hard for us to imagine that there is the slightest idea that such a possibility could exist. For us the tiniest possibility is out of the question. There is not even the tiniest possibility, not even a hypothetical possibility of our special services being involved.”

Up to now I had been convinced by what I had heard. On the balance of evidence I was coming to the conclusion that Putin himself had had no hand in the murder. But this was something different: Peskov could offer no evidence that ruled out the possibility of a freelance operation, or that suggested Moscow had even tried to rule one out.

When I pressed him he told me: “For that purpose our prosecutor’s office has opened its own investigation.” It was clear where I would have to go.

The office of the prosecutor general of the Russian Federation is set behind a small, anonymous-look-ing wooden door on Bolshaya Dmitrovka, a street behind the Bolshoi theatre. The prosecutor’s office is a powerful institution, combining oversight of policing, investigation and prosecution. The Metropolitan police’s finest visited it two weeks before me, looking for clues in the Litvinenko case.

As in the Kremlin, my reception was warm and friendly. Two young detectives, Sasha and Kolya, walked me upstairs to a cosy, overheated second-floor office. An attractive woman in her mid-thirties introduced herself as Marina Gridneva, senior legal counsel and head of the information division. She introduced another detective, and they produced a teapot and a large sponge cake topped with apricot jam. It was, explained Marina, homemade. With a cup of a very unusual, aromatic tea, I ate two slices.

The charm offensive seemed genuine and they laughed when I said journalists would not get similar treatment from Scotland Yard. But hospitality did not mean they were going to answer my questions. All my inquiries about the possibility of FSB involvement in Litvinenko’s murder were met with a steely: “That is part of an ongoing investigation so we cannot comment.”

After 20 minutes we seemed to be getting nowhere. I decided to be a little provocative. “What about the new laws of July 2006?” I asked. One of them allows the president to use the Russian secret services to eliminate “extremists” in Russia and on foreign territory. And another expands the definition of “extrem-ism” to include anyone “libellously critical of the Russian authorities”?

“It looks like a pretty clear mandate to go out and kill people like Litvinenko, doesn’t it?” I suggested.

The two detectives asked for a moment to consult. They tapped at a computer and phoned for some documents. My tape recorder registered an air of mild panic. Marina’s voice is heard asking me to help myself to some more tea and cake while they sort things out. Then, after a lengthy pause, they are back with the explanation: those laws were not adopted with any evil intent. They were a response to the abduction and murder of five Russian diplomats in Iraq.

It seemed I was going to get nowhere. They had stonewalled me with a charming but immovable double act. So I said, “Okay, thanks very much”, and they clearly thought the interview was over because they started smiling and suddenly became very expansive. Fortunately, my tape was still running to record what came next.

“Look, Martin, do you really think we’d bother assassinating a nobody like Litvinenko? Someone who left the country God knows how long ago? Who was no threat to us and didn’t have any secrets to betray? . . . He just wasn’t important enough. He didn’t know any secrets that would be a reason for liquidating him . . . Do you think we would have mounted such a special operation to eliminate him . . . with polonium that costs the earth? That we would have spent so much money on him? My God, we could have used the money to increase pensions here at home. If we’d needed to eliminate Litvinenko, we would have done it ages ago.”

I thanked them and switched off the tape recorder. It was the closest I was going to get to an admission that such operations do after all take place. And if they take place, was it not possible that someone had his own reasons to conclude that Litvinenko actually was worth the price of a vial of polonium?

The more I probed, the more I was becoming convinced that Litvinenko had been poisoned by a group of people independent of the Kremlin but with close connections to the Russian security forces.

I knew it was a group with its own reasons to target Litvinenko, a group that could advance FSB interests to justify the murder, interests that would confer at least some immunity on it if the Kremlin were to become aware of what it had done.

How was I to find these men? I sat in my Moscow hotel room, a half empty bottle of vodka in front of me, and picked up the telephone.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

On the Trail of Litvinenko’s Killers

The Litvinenko File by Martin Sixsmith, published today by Macmillan Press, goes on sale today. The Times of London offers readers an extract:

It was six o’clock on a Monday evening and the snowstorm had set in for the day. Cutting down the side of GUM, the Victorian department store that stares across Red Square to the Kremlin, I could see barely 10ft in front of me.

The red brick of the Kremlin wall emerged from the gloom and I was transported back to the first time I had come here, 20 years earlier. Then I was a young reporter with a coveted pass to attend Mikhail Gorbachev’s groundbreaking Congress of People’s Deputies, where democrats slugged it out with communist dinosaurs as Russia engaged in real political debate for the first time.

Now, in 2007, I couldn’t help wondering if much had changed. The welcome at the Spassky Gate was pretty much the same: three uniformed guards with rifles and a metal detector. But they allowed themselves a welcoming smile.

From the shadows a figure called my name. Aleksei was young, slim and cheerily informal. We chatted as we turned into the long yellow-stucco building that houses the presidential administration, the seat of power.

In the lift to the third floor I asked Aleksei who he worked for. The answer was an embarrassed: “Actually I work for the FSB; but don’t worry, I’m not a spy.”

The FSB is the Russian security service, successor to the Soviet KGB. It was about the death of a former member of the FSB that I had come to the Kremlin.

I wanted to know whether President Vladimir Putin, Russia’s most powerful leader since Joseph Stalin, had ordered the agonising death in a London hospital of Alexander Litvinenko. IT is hard to imagine that only five months ago the world had never heard of “Sasha” Litvinenko, the boy from the deep Russian provinces who rose through the ranks of the world’s most feared security service, who alleged murder and corruption in the Russian government, fled to London and took the shilling of Moscow’s avowed enemy before dying in the most sensational of circumstances last November — apparently a martyr in the covert war between the Kremlin and its political opponents.

As a habitué of Russian exile circles in London, I knew who Litvinenko was and that he was closely associated with the kingpin of the exiles, Boris Berezovsky.

Litvinenko’s second wife Marina describes him as boyish and emotional, but she says he had ruthlessness in him too. Even his closest friends say he probably had the blood of more than one victim on his hands. But he dispatched them while carrying out his duty. His constant refrain was that he had always behaved loyally and honestly.

He spent most of his career being loyal to the authorities in his country, whoever they were: first the communists, then Boris Yeltsin’s reformers, then the hardline autocracy imposed by Putin. He used to speak of Putin, a former KGB spy, as his role model, idolising him with an intensity bordering on love. But he was transformed to an acrimonious, diehard foe.

For six years Litvinenko had been venting his bile on Putin from London, hurling ever more outrageous accusations including murder and paedophilia. He had also directed increasingly bitter polemics at his former colleagues in the FSB. He had become involved in murky business dealings, with dark suggestions of blackmail plots. And he had exasperated and finally fallen out with Berezovsky himself.

The details of his death are now known worldwide. The British police have established that — in London on November 1 last year — someone persuaded him to eat or drink a dose of polonium 210, which destroyed his internal organs before doctors could discover what was killing him.

There is overwhelming evidence that Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, former FSB men who met him that day, left a polonium trail all over west London. But there is no evidence that they administered the poison. Nor is there any obvious personal motive for their wanting to kill him.

Many others did have a motive for murder. In the end someone’s patience snapped. So who had the motive, and the means, to carry out what was to all intents and purposes the world’s first act of international nuclear terrorism? The answer lies in the social and political upheaval that brought Putin to power and in the business conflicts, vested interests and political corruption that have divided Russia into warring camps.

In this war each side accuses the other of the darkest acts, sometimes without the slightest basis in fact, and the hand of Putin or Berezovsky is seen behind every evil. Men like Litvinenko have been turned into the expendable pawns of ruthless masters.

As I conducted my research into his background, I was amazed by the life he had led, the risks he had taken and the enemies he had made with such insouciance. His past threw up so many potential reasons for his murder that I was surprised he had survived as long as he did.

The son of a military man, Litvinenko did his military service in an elite division under the command of the KGB and was later invited to join the KGB’s counter-intel-ligence service in the twilight years of the Soviet Union. In the mid1990s, when Chechnya was fighting for independence, he was sent there with the new FSB’s special forces, the Osobysty. He claimed to have experienced an epiphany interrogating a teenage Chechen fighter who told him: “I am not alone; the whole of my class enlisted straight after we graduated from school. We just knew we had to do it . . . for our country.”

There were also less savoury tales of his conduct. His former FSB commander in Chechnya, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Gusak, publicly accused him after he was poisoned last November of having been a torturer, a killer and a coward.

It is indisputable that the FSB committed many atrocities in Chechnya, and some of Litvinenko’s closest friends accept that, as a member of the feared Osobysty, he must have been involved in dirty work.

Gusak, however, is not a disinterested witness. He was intimately linked with an episode that bears directly on Litvinenko’s murder.

AFTER Chechnya, Litvinenko was invited to join a new unit, the Directorate for the Analysis and Suppression of the Activities of Criminal Organisations (URPO), set up to wipe out the crime bosses who were plundering Russia.

In Chechnya, questions of legality and human rights rarely impeded FSB operations. Now the same bespredel (lawlessness within the state) was going to be unleashed in Moscow. Litvinenko would later describe URPO as the “bureau of nonjudicial executions”.

Andrei Nekrasov, a film maker and friend of Litvinenko, told me: “That unit, to be completely frank, was composed of people that the leadership thought were capable of pulling off quite violent operations . . . and never talking about them.”

The director of the FSB at the time, Nikolai Kovalyov, says: “Litvinenko and co supported the creation of so-called White Death Brigades — in plain language, hit squads. Their reasoning was that it was impossible to combat organised crime in Russia with legal methods, so illegal methods would have to be used. That is to say, murders . . .”

In late 1997, URPO was put under the control of a senior FSB colonel, Yevgeny Khokholkov, whom Litvinenko had investigated for connections with drug gangs. Despite a compromising videotape, Khokholkov had kept his job. Disenchantment was sown in Litvinenko’s mind.

It heightened when he was ordered to ambush and beat up Mikhail Trepashkin, an FSB lieutenant-colonel who had been probing allegations that high-ranking officers were involved in serious crime.

Unable to defend himself, the slightly built Trepashkin begged Litvinenko for the chance to explain what he had found out about FSB corruption. Marina Litvinenko says he convinced her husband that things were badly wrong in the FSB and that someone had to do something about it.

The chance to do something soon arose. On December 27 1997, according to Litvinenko, he and four other URPO officers were called into Khokholkov’s office and told to assassinate Boris Berezovsky.

No written order was given. There was clearly a well-established process of deniability in place: such decisions were taken in cosy chats on sofas in private offices with no minutes and no paper trail. This is of crucial importance now in examining the decision-making process behind Litvinenko’s own assassination nearly a decade later.

In 1997 Berezovsky was probably the most powerful man in Russia. He and other postcommunist billion-aires had rescued Yeltsin from defeat in the 1996 presidential elections with unlimited money and media support. In return, Yeltsin had rewarded them with the keys to Russia’s economy, auctioning off state companies at knockdown prices.

Berezovsky was also a media magnate. His real interest, however, was the acquisition of power. He exerted such influence over the weak and chronically drunk president that he was widely regarded as making decisions for him. By the time Litvinenko was ordered to kill him, everyone knew that Berezovsky was a man not to be trifled with.

Litvinenko had an additional problem: he knew Berezovsky well. He had investigated a bomb attack on the rising tycoon in 1994, and they had become friends. The relationship had been cemented when, Berezovsky says, Litvinenko prevented the Moscow police from framing him for the murder of a prominent television presenter. “Alexander really saved my life, there was no doubt about it.”

For two months, Litvinenko and his comrades carefully teased out who was behind the proposed assassination, talking to contacts and sources, trying to discover if its backers were themselves powerful people and whether or not it would be in their own interests to go along with it. They knew a bad call could mean an end to their careers and, quite possibly, their lives.

Concluding that the top people in the FSB didn’t know about the order to kill Berezovsky, they reported it to the director. The move backfired. Khokholkov denied their story, and they were put under investigation.

Meeting secretly, the five men decided to seek protection from their proposed victim. Berezovsky could be a very powerful patron for a group of ambitious FSB officers looking to further their careers. Litvinenko told him the whole story.

“Initially I thought it was just a joke,” says Berezovsky. But he also spotted the potential to get control of the FSB.

He asked Litvinenko to bring the other four men to his office to make a videotape of their allegations. Only three turned up, but on the video one is heard quoting the order they received: “He said to us, ‘If there was an order to knock someone off — sorry, to kill; he said to kill — could you fix it?”

Berezovsky: “To kill me?” Agent: “Yes, of course you.” An FSB man later identified as Alexander Gusak also describes on the tape a face-to-face meeting with Khokholkov where he was asked if he would kill Berezovsky. “I replied that if it was properly sanctioned and had the right stamps — that is, the stamp of the prosecutor’s office and the stamp of our own organisation — and it had the right materials to back it up, I would be ready to kill Berezovsky and anyone else.”

Berezovsky took the incriminating videotape to a rising star in the Kremlin: Vladimir Putin, at the time a presidential aide. Berezovsky considered him a reformer and a friend. They regularly visited each other’s houses and even took skiing holidays together.

At first the ploy seemed to work. Putin took charge of the FSB, and the hated Khokholkov was transferred. Litvinenko thought he would have a big role in a cleaned-up FSB under his hero Putin.

Berezovsky had helped get Putin appointed and now expected him to pay this favour back by installing friendly faces in all the positions of power. If things worked out, the FSB would become a loyal Berezovsky fiefdom for him in the looming power battles over the succession to Yeltsin.

It didn’t work out, however. Putin’s debt of gratitude was small beer compared with the need to look after number one. The Berezovsky camp was just one among several warring Kremlin factions he weighed up to decide where his best interests lay.

To apply pressure on Putin, Berezovsky told Litvinenko and his colleagues to go public with their revelations about the assassination plot in a televised press conference. When some of the shocked agents refused — it was unheard of for FSB men to go public — he told them they had come too far to turn back.

On the eve of the press conference he summoned them to a grey-stuccoed building that had once been the family mansion of the noble Smirnov family. Inside, they were served drinks in Berezovsky’s club, the Logovaz Salon, with its gilded walls, ornate decorations and giant aquarium. Then they were coached on the statements they would be making.

Next day, in front of the cameras, Litvinenko accused his superiors of extortion, kidnappings and murder and, in a not very coded message to Putin, called on the FSB to cleanse itself.

Litvinenko identified himself but the five men with him were not so brave: one wore a ski mask and the others dark glasses. I now believe I know their names, which would recur with ominous regularity in both Litvinenko’s future life and the investigation of his eventual death.

They included Gusak, who would accuse Litvinenko of war crimes in Chechnya; Colonel Viktor Shebalin, who sat next to Litvinenko making an exaggerated show of friendship and support; and Major Andrei Ponkin, who was the only other man to speak. Ponkin alleged, among other things, that he and others had been instructed to kill the dissident former FSB man Mikhail Trepashkin.

Far from being nudged into cooperating, Putin was infuriated. The whistle-blowers were called in by FSB interrogators. Some were threatened, others offered inducements. It was made forcefully clear to them that they had brought shame on the service and the motherland. They could face the prospect of prison, or they could recant and agree to work against the “traitors” who had led them astray.

The question of exactly which of Litvinenko’s comrades succumbed to these blandishments is a vital piece of information for anyone seeking to unravel the events that led to his death.

Marina Litvinenko claims Shebalin was working all along for the FSB as “a provocateur”. Litvinenko’s friend, the historian Yuri Felshtinsky, believes Shebalin, Ponkin and Gusak all took roles in Putin’s subsequent war against Berezovsky and Litvinenko.

From that day on they would have every incentive to silence the increasingly irritating voice of the man they claimed had tricked them into putting their lives and careers on the line.

Events then moved rapidly. Berezovsky slid down the greasy pole of Kremlin politics as Putin rose up it. He was given a ceremonial job that kept him out of Moscow, and in March 1999 he was ousted altogether. Within days Litvinenko was arrested for trumped up petty crimes.

Felshtinsky says that the FSB tried to persuade Litvinenko to cut a deal in the same way that his former colleagues seem to have done. “When he refused . . . the FSB told him, ‘Look. Now you must know the end of the story. The end of the story is that you are going to be killed, or you are going to be put in prison and killed in prison. But you know our organisation: there is no other way. You are going to be killed’.”

He was charged with beating up an arrested terror suspect. To seasoned FSB men this was ridiculous; few could think when arrested terror suspects were not beaten up.

The prosecution produced a grainy video of a blond FSB officer punching a crouching prisoner in the face. The interrogator is wearing a military cap and I certainly could not identify him as being Sasha Litvinenko. He is, however, surrounded by apparent URPO agents.

Two officers who had served with Litvinenko recognised the film and they knew the man in it was not him. They found the original of the tape, which had other footage proving his innocence.

According to Litvinenko’s father, Walter, they were about to produce the tape in court when Litvinenko was threatened in his cell. “The FSB came to him and said, ‘You have a son. If you produce that video in court, you should be very afraid for your son’.”

Even without the video, the military judge threw out the case. But as he did so a team of crack spetsnaz troops — Russia’s SAS — stormed into court and the military prosecutor announced new charges. After another acquittal a third trial was ordered, and harassment continued.

FSB interrogators warned Litvinenko: “If they find you not guilty this time, it’s not you we’ll be talking to; we’ll sort things out with your wife and your kid. You don’t think you’ll get away, do you? You’re a traitor to the system and you’re going to be punished.”

His friend Felshtinksy made an unofficial approach to an FSB general, asking if a deal could perhaps be done for the Litvinenkos to slip quietly into exile abroad. The general replied, “I can honestly tell you there is no way for that man to leave Russia alive. And if ever I meet him again, I will personally kill him with my two hands.”

That, says Marina Litvinenko, is when Sasha made up his mind to flee, as Berezovsky had done. During his personal drama Yeltsin had resigned and Putin was now president.

SEVEN years later, at the end of a wide Kremlin corridor, Aleksei ushered me through an anteroom into the large office of Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s head of information.

Peskov is a sprightly man in his early forties, a career diplomat who enjoys the confidence of the president. Over a cup of hot Georgian tea I tried to gauge if his boss really could have been involved in the Litvinenko poisoning, as the dead man’s friends have claimed, or if the accusations were merely the fabrications or wishful thinking of enemies at home and abroad.

An earnest, sophisticated man, Peskov is far removed from the bullying, stonewalling Soviet officials I used to meet. He comes across as reasonable and sincere in his love for his country and his faith in his president. He knows Putin intimately — he works with him every day — and feels personal resentment on behalf of his boss.

I knew he had discussed the Litvinenko case with Putin at great length and had given him advice on how to remain calm and measured in the face of what the president believed to be an unjustified personal affront against himself.

“You know, I would never discuss that [advice] in public. But nevertheless, what is obvious is that the president felt himself necessary to express his condolences to the family of Litvinenko. He accepted that it was a human tragedy — a man died — but he never tried to camouflage, to hide the fact that he was not fond of Mr Litvinenko. And you will find very few people in my country — including his first wife, by the way, and his two children — who are fond of him or who are proud of him. This is not the case in my country.”

It was a strange sensation, sitting in the heart of the Kremlin discussing the personal feelings of the most powerful man in Russia. Would previous occupants of these quarters have been so open with a foreigner?

I asked how Putin felt about the allegations levelled at him personally, how it felt to be accused of murder. Peskov said he would not discuss such things in public, but I later spoke to another source close to Putin who knew about his feelings.

“The president is very upset by this,” he told me. “He is upset by these accusations made personally about him. He simply can’t believe that people are saying these things about him as a person. He’s very angry about the way the British press has named him as a murderer — that’s why he won’t speak about it any more.”

I asked why, if this was the case, Putin had refrained from expressing his anger and hurt. He told me: “The president doesn’t like his feelings being discussed in public.”

Even if Putin had not personally ordered the Litvinenko killing, it could still have been the unauthorised work of the Russian security services. I asked Peskov if the president had ordered an inquiry to make sure the FSB was not involved.

“Look, I don’t know. I am being very frank with you now. It’s not a question of Putin not being sure if such an involvement was possible or impossible. It is hard for us to imagine that there is the slightest idea that such a possibility could exist. For us the tiniest possibility is out of the question. There is not even the tiniest possibility, not even a hypothetical possibility of our special services being involved.”

Up to now I had been convinced by what I had heard. On the balance of evidence I was coming to the conclusion that Putin himself had had no hand in the murder. But this was something different: Peskov could offer no evidence that ruled out the possibility of a freelance operation, or that suggested Moscow had even tried to rule one out.

When I pressed him he told me: “For that purpose our prosecutor’s office has opened its own investigation.” It was clear where I would have to go.

The office of the prosecutor general of the Russian Federation is set behind a small, anonymous-look-ing wooden door on Bolshaya Dmitrovka, a street behind the Bolshoi theatre. The prosecutor’s office is a powerful institution, combining oversight of policing, investigation and prosecution. The Metropolitan police’s finest visited it two weeks before me, looking for clues in the Litvinenko case.

As in the Kremlin, my reception was warm and friendly. Two young detectives, Sasha and Kolya, walked me upstairs to a cosy, overheated second-floor office. An attractive woman in her mid-thirties introduced herself as Marina Gridneva, senior legal counsel and head of the information division. She introduced another detective, and they produced a teapot and a large sponge cake topped with apricot jam. It was, explained Marina, homemade. With a cup of a very unusual, aromatic tea, I ate two slices.

The charm offensive seemed genuine and they laughed when I said journalists would not get similar treatment from Scotland Yard. But hospitality did not mean they were going to answer my questions. All my inquiries about the possibility of FSB involvement in Litvinenko’s murder were met with a steely: “That is part of an ongoing investigation so we cannot comment.”

After 20 minutes we seemed to be getting nowhere. I decided to be a little provocative. “What about the new laws of July 2006?” I asked. One of them allows the president to use the Russian secret services to eliminate “extremists” in Russia and on foreign territory. And another expands the definition of “extrem-ism” to include anyone “libellously critical of the Russian authorities”?

“It looks like a pretty clear mandate to go out and kill people like Litvinenko, doesn’t it?” I suggested.

The two detectives asked for a moment to consult. They tapped at a computer and phoned for some documents. My tape recorder registered an air of mild panic. Marina’s voice is heard asking me to help myself to some more tea and cake while they sort things out. Then, after a lengthy pause, they are back with the explanation: those laws were not adopted with any evil intent. They were a response to the abduction and murder of five Russian diplomats in Iraq.

It seemed I was going to get nowhere. They had stonewalled me with a charming but immovable double act. So I said, “Okay, thanks very much”, and they clearly thought the interview was over because they started smiling and suddenly became very expansive. Fortunately, my tape was still running to record what came next.

“Look, Martin, do you really think we’d bother assassinating a nobody like Litvinenko? Someone who left the country God knows how long ago? Who was no threat to us and didn’t have any secrets to betray? . . . He just wasn’t important enough. He didn’t know any secrets that would be a reason for liquidating him . . . Do you think we would have mounted such a special operation to eliminate him . . . with polonium that costs the earth? That we would have spent so much money on him? My God, we could have used the money to increase pensions here at home. If we’d needed to eliminate Litvinenko, we would have done it ages ago.”

I thanked them and switched off the tape recorder. It was the closest I was going to get to an admission that such operations do after all take place. And if they take place, was it not possible that someone had his own reasons to conclude that Litvinenko actually was worth the price of a vial of polonium?

The more I probed, the more I was becoming convinced that Litvinenko had been poisoned by a group of people independent of the Kremlin but with close connections to the Russian security forces.

I knew it was a group with its own reasons to target Litvinenko, a group that could advance FSB interests to justify the murder, interests that would confer at least some immunity on it if the Kremlin were to become aware of what it had done.

How was I to find these men? I sat in my Moscow hotel room, a half empty bottle of vodka in front of me, and picked up the telephone.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !