A former Russian spy. A lethal dose of a rare radioactive isotope. An international murder mystery. The 2006 killing of Alexander Litvinenko had all the elements of a Cold War thriller – except it was terrifyingly real. More than a decade later, Litvinenko‘s assassination still haunts UK-Russia relations and serves as a dark milestone in Vladimir Putin‘s consolidation of power.
From Soviet Soldier to FSB Whistleblower
Born in 1962 in the city of Voronezh in southwestern Russia, Alexander Litvinenko came of age in the waning years of the Soviet Union. After finishing school in 1980, he was drafted into the Interior Ministry troops and later studied at the Kirov Higher Command School. Litvinenko went on to serve as an officer in the Committee for State Security (KGB) and its main successor organization, the Federal Security Service (FSB).
It was as an organized crime investigator for the FSB in the late 1990s that Litvinenko began grappling with the rampant corruption of the Boris Yeltsin era. The chaotic decade after the Soviet collapse saw a precipitous economic decline, with Russian GDP falling by nearly 50% between 1990 and 1998. Against this backdrop of instability, crime and corruption flourished. An estimated 40% of private businesses were forced to pay protection money to organized crime groups, while high-level mafia figures enjoyed cozy relationships with senior officials.
Litvinenko‘s investigations led him to conclude that the rot extended to the highest echelons of the FSB and the Russian government. In 1998, he held a press conference with other FSB officers accusing their superiors of ordering the assassination of Boris Berezovsky, a powerful oligarch then locked in a feud with Yeltsin‘s inner circle. The FSB, Litvinenko alleged, "is being used for political purposes and for settling scores with undesirable persons."
Rather than heeding his warnings, the Russian authorities fired Litvinenko from the FSB and launched a series of criminal inquiries against him. Fearing imprisonment or worse, Litvinenko made the momentous decision to seek political asylum in the UK in 2000. "I have been subjected to systematic persecution," he wrote in his asylum statement, "which has included armed attacks, abuse of power by the Russian special services and an attempt on my life by the Russian mafia with the connivance of the Russian special services."
Exile and Activism
Safe on British soil, Litvinenko became a vociferous critic of the Putin regime that took power after Yeltsin‘s resignation in late 1999. He published two books, Blowing Up Russia and The Gang from the Lubyanka, accusing the FSB of staging apartment bombings in 1999 that killed nearly 300 civilians. The attacks were officially blamed on Chechen terrorists, but Litvinenko argued they were a false flag operation to justify a new war in Chechnya and boost Putin‘s popularity ahead of the 2000 presidential election.
Litvinenko‘s allegations went beyond corruption to directly implicate Putin in heinous crimes. In a 2006 article, he accused Putin of having ordered the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, another prominent Kremlin critic. "I have no doubt that this murder was carried out on the orders of Vladimir Putin, the president of the Russian Federation," Litvinenko wrote. "Anna had been receiving threats, but she was not afraid of them."
Meanwhile, Litvinenko was involved in some dubious dealings of his own. He remained closely associated with Boris Berezovsky, a controversial figure who had fallen out with Putin and also received asylum in the UK. Litvinenko did freelance work for Britain‘s MI6 intelligence service and reportedly had ties to Chechen separatists as well. None of these activities, however, warranted what befell him in 2006.
A Lethal Dose
On November 1, 2006, Litvinenko met with two Russian men, Andrei Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun, at the Pine Bar of London‘s Millennium Hotel. Shortly after the meeting, he fell violently ill with nausea, abdominal pain, and vomiting. As his condition worsened over the following weeks, doctors were baffled. It was only after Litvinenko‘s hair began falling out that they suspected radiation poisoning.
Tests confirmed their worst fears – Litvinenko had ingested polonium-210, a rare and highly toxic radioactive isotope. A notoriously difficult poison to trace, polonium-210 emits alpha radiation that is easily blocked by skin or paper. It has to be inhaled or swallowed to cause harm, but once inside the body, it is ferociously lethal. A dose the size of a few grains of salt is enough to kill.
On November 23, three weeks after first falling ill, Litvinenko died of heart failure caused by radiation syndrome. In a deathbed statement, he laid the blame squarely on Putin: "You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed… You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life."
The Polonium Trail
The audacious use of a radiological weapon in the heart of London sparked a massive investigation by British police, who identified Lugovoy and Kovtun as their prime suspects. A former KGB bodyguard, Lugovoy had since become a millionaire businessman and member of the Russian parliament. Kovtun was an ex-Soviet army officer who had served in the KGB‘s protection detail in East Germany.
As detectives retraced the suspects‘ movements, they discovered a trail of polonium contamination across London. The Millennium Hotel bar, Lugovoy and Kovtun‘s hotel rooms, and even the Emirates stadium where they attended a football match tested positive for the deadly isotope. The highest readings of all came from the teapot at the Millennium Hotel‘s Pine Bar.
The evidence increasingly pointed to a brazen assassination on British soil carried out by Russian state agents. In May 2007, the UK‘s Crown Prosecution Service charged Lugovoy with murder and requested his extradition from Russia. Moscow refused, citing a constitutional prohibition on extraditing Russian citizens. Britain expelled four Russian diplomats in retaliation, and Russia responded in kind. By the end of 2007, UK-Russia relations had fallen to their lowest point since the Cold War.
The Litvinenko Inquiry
For years after her husband‘s death, Marina Litvinenko waged a tireless campaign for a public inquiry into his assassination. She argued that only an inquiry, rather than an inquest, would have the powers to examine secret evidence and get to the truth. In 2014, the British High Court finally agreed, and the following year, Sir Robert Owen opened the long-awaited Litvinenko Inquiry.
Over several months, the inquiry heard testimony from dozens of witnesses and experts. The presented evidence included forensic analysis of the polonium trail, surveillance footage of Lugovoy and Kovtun, and secret intelligence material. The inquiry report, released in January 2016, was damning. Owen concluded that Lugovoy and Kovtun had carried out the assassination and that they were almost certainly acting under the direction of the FSB. Even more explosively, he found there was a "strong probability" that the FSB operation to kill Litvinenko was approved by then-FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev and by President Putin himself.
Russia swiftly dismissed the inquiry‘s findings as politically motivated and lacking in hard evidence. Lugovoy, now a member of parliament for a far-right nationalist party, called the charges against him "absurd." Neither he nor Kovtun have ever faced trial for Litvinenko‘s murder, and both remain under the protection of the Russian state.
A Chilling Legacy
More than 15 years after his death, Alexander Litvinenko‘s story continues to reverberate. His assassination marked a turning point in the Putin era, a sign of an emboldened Kremlin willing to eliminate opponents with ruthless abandon. The flagrant use of a radiological substance in a Western capital sent an unambiguous message: nowhere was beyond the reach of the Russian state.
Sadly, Litvinenko‘s case was not an isolated one. Other Putin critics have met grim fates abroad, from the 2015 shooting of Boris Nemtsov in Moscow to the 2018 Novichok nerve agent poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England. The common thread is a chilling willingness by the Russian state to silence dissent by any means necessary.
For the man who risked everything to expose the dark truths of his homeland, there is little solace to be found. Alexander Litvinenko‘s killers remain at large, his widow remains a widow, and his cause remains unfinished. Yet in death as in life, his story stands as a testament to the courage of those who speak truth to power, no matter the cost.
- FSB – Federal Security Service, the main successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB
- KGB – Committee for State Security in the Soviet Union
- False flag – A covert operation designed to deceive, with the deception creating the appearance of a particular party being responsible for some activity, disguising the actual source of responsibility
- Polonium-210 – A rare radioactive isotope, highly toxic if ingested, inhaled, or absorbed
- Novichok – A highly potent class of nerve agents developed by the Soviet Union and Russia
