The European Court of Human Rights ruled on Sept. 21 that the Russian government was responsible for the murder of ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko.
In 2006 Litvinenko was poisoned in London with polonium-210, a radioactive isotope used in industry and early nuclear weapons.
The British police charged Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB officer and pro-Kremlin lawmaker, and businessman Dmitry Kovtun with murdering Litvivenko. In 2016, a British court concluded that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and Nikolai Patrushev, the former head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), “probably” ordered Litvinenko’s assassination.
The Russian government denied the accusations and refused to extradite Lugovoy and Kovtun.
The European Court of Human Rights’ most recent decision is a victory for Litvinenko’s widow Marina, who had brought the case against the Kremlin.
She argued that her husband had been killed “on the direction or with the acquiescence or connivance of the Russian authorities and that the Russian authorities failed to conduct an effective domestic investigation into the murder”.
The court ordered the Russian authorities to pay Marina Litvinenko 100,000 euros in damages and 22,500 euros in costs.
“The court found it established, beyond reasonable doubt, that the assassination had been carried out by Mr Lugovoy and Mr Kovtun,” the court said. “The planned and complex operation involving the procurement of a rare deadly poison, the travel arrangements for the pair, and repeated and sustained attempts to administer the poison indicated that Mr Litvinenko had been the target of the operation.”
The court also said that if Lugovoy and Kovtun had carried out a “rogue operation”, Moscow would have the information to prove it.
“However, the government had made no serious attempt to provide such information or to counter the findings of the UK authorities,” the ruling said.
Litvinenko was highly critical of Putin. In 2002 he published a book called “Blowing Up Russia,” in which he accused Putin and the FSB of orchestrating the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow to propel Putin to power.
More than 20 critics of Putin have been killed or died in suspicious circumstances.
Russia’s most prominent opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned in Russia in 2020 but survived the assassination attempt. German doctors, as well as several independent labs in Europe, said that he had been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent – a chemical weapon produced by the Russian government.
The Insider, Bellingcat, CNN and Der Spiegel have published an investigation according to which Navalny had been poisoned by agents of Russia’s Federal Security Service and identified their names.
The same FSB squad that allegedly tried to kill Navalny had also tailed several other people who were then found dead with signs of poisoning or survived poisoning attempts, according to Bellingcat, the Insider and Der Spiegel.
