Perspectives on Russia

Today we learnt that the former officer of the KGB Andrei Lugovoi, who has been accused of being an accomplice in the murder of also ex-KGB Aleksandr Litvinenko in London last autumn, will stand for election representing the rather bizarre Liberal Democratic Party (which is neither particularly liberal nor democratic). Some newspapers have been arguing that Lugovoi in this way might be seeking protection from being extradited to the United Kingdom, since members of the Russian parliament are immune from prosecution. That does not seem to be the case, since Lugovoi anyhow would be protected by the Russian constitution, which apparently (I must admit I have not read it myself) makes it illegal to extradite Russian nationals. Also, even the parliamentary immunity, according to the newspaper Izvestiya (http://www.izvestiya.ru/politic/article3108355/), is known to have been lifted when deemed necessary. Thus, a political career would offer no more protection for Lugovoi than he already enjoys. The move by the Liberal Democrats (LDPR) should rather be seen as an attempt to gain a mass media momentum before parliamentary elections this year. According to the same article in Isvestiya, the LDPR is balancing on the 7% threshold to win seats in the Duma. They hope Lugovoi will act as a pull-factor for the part of the constituency that might sympathize with the somewhat original (mostly obscurely nationalistic) views of their party, but does not really care too much about voting. At the party congress, leader Vladimir Zhirinovski portrayed his new recruit as a victim of British imperialism and said that the whole murder story was an MI6 plot.

Speculations about whether the Russian government ordered the Litvinenko murder have been abundant since the story broke, while it does not seem probable. Consider the method. By killing their victim with the help of radioactive poisoning (thus actually committing the first case of nuclear terrorism ever), the perpetrators committed probably the most indiscreet killing in the history of mankind. Not only was the poison especially torturous, they also left a radioactive trace covering large parts of a foreign capital and the aeroplane on which they flew in from Moscow. Now, if you were a government and you wanted to kill someone on foreign soil, why would you not choose some method less obvious? Would it be so difficult to organise an automobile accident or a mugging-went-wrong? Also, it is the question of timing. Ever since Litvinenko accused the Federal Security Service (FSB) of organising the terrorist bombings of two apartment buildings in Moscow in 1999, he was detested and hated by his former colleagues. It should not be ruled out that revenge was indeed the motive behind the killing, but why would the Russian government dispose of him now and draw even more attention to something long buried? This is not the same as saying that the men of the Kremlin are sorry about what happened. It does not necessarily mean that they do not know who were behind it. I just do not think they ordered it.

Obviously though, the murderers were well connected; getting your hands on polonium-210 most likely is not the easiest thing to pull off. The question is whether it is floating around the black market or if the perpetrators actually received it from a source within the government. If it is the latter, and the Kremlin disagreed with the need to dispose of Litvinenko, then we should have seen some re-organisation among the top echelon of the security and intelligence community. So far, we have not. This would imply that, even though the polonium probably once originated from within the government, it has been out of there for some time. Like Lugovoi, by the way.

There is, however, a message in all of this. Since the organisers behind the murder could not possibly have underestimated the reaction that would follow killing someone the radioactive way, they must have wanted everyone to notice what happened. There was a message, but to whom? Exile oligarch Boris Berezovski, who was Litvinenko’s guardian? Someone sitting on information that, according to some sources, Litvinenko was using to blackmail people in Russia? No clue. Honestly.