Litvinenko, Politkovskaya, Nemtsov, Prigozhin: anyone who touches the threads of Putin’s power dies in Russia. The list of opponents of the Kremlin tsar who have been victims of mysterious attacks, poisoned and killed in real ambushes is increasingly long. Starting with Alexander Litvinenko, Russian secret service agent who left office accusing Putin of instigating assassinations and attacks carried out by intelligence to consolidate his power. Having taken refuge in London, he died after a long agony in November 2006 three weeks later drinking tea treated with highly radioactive polonium-210. Litvinenko, from his deathbed, pointed the finger at the Kremlin.
A few weeks earlier investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was killed in Moscow. She also reported having been poisoned in 2004 with a substance diluted in tea which, however, did not achieve its purpose.. Politkovskaya with her reports from Chechnya had denounced the abuses and crimes of the Russian army. She was found in the elevator of her building, shot dead on October 7, 2006, Putin’s birthday. There are those who have gone so far as to speak of a “gift” to the Tsar.
He is killed in the same way Boris Nemtsov, on the evening of February 27, 2015. An ambush on the street, near the Kremlin. Five Chechens were convicted but the mystery remains about the instigator. Nemtsov, deputy prime minister in the 1990s during Yeltsin’s presidency, of liberal extraction, had become one of Putin’s main challengers in Parliament. Condemning among other things the annexation of Crimea.
Then last August, a plane carrying Yevgney Prigozhin, Putin’s former chef and former associate of the Tsar who became the controversial leader of the Wagner militias, protagonist of an armed march towards Moscow in June which raised fears of an internal coup, crashes in the skies between Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Prigozhin “was a man with a difficult but talented destiny”, Putin dismisses him and won’t even go to the funeral. They leave a mystery open. There are also those who managed to survive: in 2018 the former spy Sergei Skripal, who had started collaborating with His Majesty’s 007, and his daughter were found unconscious on a bench in the south of England and hospitalized in critical conditions.
The police speak of Novichok nerve agent. The Skripals survive, but the case further deteriorates relations between Russia and Great Britain, the golden exile of Putin’s opponents and disgraced oligarchs. The poison had appeared on the scene even earlier, in Ukraine: in 2004 Viktor Yushenko, protagonist of the presidential challenge against the pro-Russian Viktor Ianukovich, fell seriously ill after ingesting an enormous quantity of dioxin. He survives and wins the elections, but his face is disfigured. His supporters have always blamed Moscow.