The report into the murder of the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, in London in 2006, concludes that the killing was ‘probably’ authorised by President Putin himself.
The British government has responded by protesting to the Russian ambassador and freezing the assets of the two Russians accused of actually carrying out the murder. But many, including Mr Litvinenko’s widow, think the government needs to take a much tougher line. Are they right? Or would it be a mistake for Britain’s to up the ante in confronting President Putin?
Alexander Litvinenko was a former member of the Russian secret service, the FSB. He fell out with Vladimir Putin, who was then the head of the FSB because, he claimed, he had been ordered to kill the Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, who had turned against the Kremlin. Litvinenko refused and started to blow the whistle on his old employers and on Mr Putin in particular. After fleeing to London with his wife and infant son in 2000, he accused Putin, now president of Russia, of links with the Russian mafia, of being involved with Colombian drug barons and of coming to power by using the FSB to plant a bomb in a Moscow apartment block, killing three hundred people, whilst blaming it on Chechen rebels. He accused President Putin of being behind the murder of the investigative journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, and even of being a paedophile.
In November 2006 he died an agonising death after being poisoned by a cup of green tea laced with radioactive polonium-210 in a London hotel. The two Russians with whom he had had tea that day were Andrei Lugovoy, an ex-body guard with the FSB, and Dimitri Kovtun, a Russian army veteran. They were accused of killing him by lacing the tea with the poison. Traces of it were found in their hotel rooms and other places they had passed through.
The coroner at Mr Litvinenko’s inquest, Sir Robert Owen, called for a public inquiry into his death so that secret government intelligence, which could not be revealed in an open coroner’s court, could be examined in closed sessions. The inquiry was set up in 2014 with Sir Robert at its head.
Sir Robert concluded that there was a ‘strong probability’ that the FSB was behind the murder and that ‘probably’ it had been authorised by President Putin. He cited as motives the fact that Mr Litvinenko had been such a public critic of both the FSB and Putin himself, and that he had worked closely with Britain’s MI6. In addition, Russia had refused earlier requests for Kovtun and Lugovoy to be extradited to stand trial in Britain and Lugovoy had subsequently been elected to the Russian parliament and awarded a state medal last year. Sir Robert said that the Russian president had ‘supported and protected Mr Lugovoy’ in a way that ‘suggests a level of approval for the killing’. He added that the Russian state under President Putin was probably responsible for seven other murders of critics of the regime in the period before Mr Litvinenko’s death.
Russian response to the Owen report has been scornful. Dmitri Peskov, Mr Putin’s spokesman, described the inquiry as a ‘joke’. He said: ‘But you can probably put that down to subtle British humour, when an open public inquiry hangs on classified information from unnamed intelligence services and is based on prolific use of the words “possibly” and “probably”.’ Messrs Lugovoy and Kovtun have long denied any involvement in the murder. They claim it was the work of British intelligence.
The Home Secretary, Theresa May, accepted the report’s conclusion. She said the assets of Lugovoy and Kovtun in Britain would be seized and asked the director of public prosecutions to consider making fresh extradition requests for them from Russia, where they live in some style. Mr Lugovoy said the chances of his being extradited were nil. Quoting a Russian proverb, he said: ‘The dog barks; the caravan moves on.’
The shadow home secretary, Andy Burnham, called the murder ‘an unparalleled act of state-sponsored terrorism that must be met with a commensurate response’. He said there needed to be a ‘full review’ of Britain’s economic and cultural ties with Russia, and suggested a possible boycott of the football World Cup, due to be held in Russia in 2018. Downing Street rejected the idea.
Mr Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, went further. She called for targeted economic sanctions and travel bans on named individuals and organisations and the immediate expulsion of all Russian intelligence officers in Britain. A similar course of action was taken in 1971 when 105 Soviet intelligence officers were expelled overnight, and again in 1985 when 25 were expelled. In each case Moscow reacted with tit-for-tat expulsions of its own.
But as in 1971 and 1985, British diplomats are urging caution. They argue that realpolitik requires us to cooperate with President Putin rather than antagonise him. In particular they say that Britain’s priority at the moment must be defeating ISIS and that this can be achieved only by working with the Russian government, especially over Syria. Nothing, not even evidence suggesting President Putin was behind a murder in the British capital, should distract the British government in pursuit of this end.
Mr Cameron seems to be heeding this advice. After the publication of the inquiry report he said: ‘Do we, at some level, have to go on having some sort of relationship with them [the Russian government] because we need a solution to the Syria crisis? Yes we do. But we do it with clear eyes and a very cold heart.’
Many people, and certainly Marina Litvinenko, believe that we will pay a price if the British government does not take harsher action against the perpetrators of what it accepts is ‘state-sponsored terrorism’ on the streets of London. Not only will the murderers of Alexander Litvinenko go unpunished, but the Putin regime in Moscow will conclude that it can go on acting in this way with impunity. But others will argue that, regrettable as that may be, it is a relatively small price to pay in order to go on working with a government whose assistance we so vitally need. And some go further. In the long run, they say, the more hostility there is between Russia and the west, the more dangerous the world becomes. The pragmatic approach is to hold our noses and antagonise Moscow as little as possible – however unpalatable that might be.
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