Topic: Putin Probably aprproved murder (Read 1669 times)

Yesterday's edition of "The Special Correspondent" program was dedicated to this "skeleton out of the British closet".

http://russia.tv/video/show/brand_id/3957/episode_id/1268114/

The journalist did some telling and revealing investigations. There is an interview with Litvinenko's daughter, who said that she never got shown her father's death certificate and that during the funeral she appeared to be the only grieving person.

There was a boom in insider-based conspiracy theories after 9/11 and Putin had been blowing up buildings and wiping out schoolchildren and doing other evil things. But some theories have legs and others not so much in the long run. Especially if the smell test leads to London and some disgruntled Russians there.

Though sometimes GRU used explosive devices, I think that russian intelligence would prefer to use either bullet or ice ax to deal with Litvinenko's issue. Very simple and effective, Bandera and Trotsky would agree with that.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/16/past.russia

....some men coming into Litvinenko's hospital ward, shaving his head and taking pictures of him - the pictures you see in the MSM.

Yes, I remember that one. The whole affair seemed extremely dramatized, especially since it was a question of well, pretty much a nobody. At least not someone that the Russians would bump off in such a theatrical manner. And I guess their intelligence services use much more prosaic methods anyway if they need to get rid of someone.  The story didn´t seem to have much legs at the time and I doubt that this rehashing has any more traction.

Death penalty?

Is this the (renewed) topic about the murder of Litvinenko by the British special services and then a post-haste attempt to frame Russia for it (with an explicit character assassination, targeted at Putin)?

I saw this hitting the MSM a few days ago, with the immediate predictable reaction from USA along the lines of "oh, great, finally a fresh reason to put 'moar sanctionz' on Russia". Make you wonder who ordered the news...

I am still waiting for a sensible explanation to Litvinenko's wife's testimony regarding some men coming into Litvinenko's hospital ward, shaving his head and taking pictures of him - the pictures you see in the MSM. And the fact that polonium traces appeared later in places, where no trace of polonium was found during the first inspections - as if somebody was adding more drama as an afterthought...

Oh yeah, War and Peace. I was going to download all episodes when it was over and watch it all on a rainy day. Good to be reminded.

I can only speak for myself, but in my experience the favourite topics of conversation for the Great British public are the weather, last nights telly, football, welfare cuts/austerity/economic decline and the ins and outs of the latest BMA recommendations on safe alcohol consumption. Not the findings of the inquiry by Sir Robert Owen.

Nobody gives a shite about double agent Litvinenko/Putin/Crimea. No-one I know could, within a 500 mile diameter margin of error, even put their finger on Moscow, St. Petersburg or Vladivostock.

And now we are all readily devouring the BBC's adaptation of War and Peace I am sure we are just as ready to see the Russians as our brothers as we are our enemies.

Yes, its as shallow,vacuous, transparent - but ultimately innocent - as that. No-one gives a shite.

Putin did it ? I dunno.
The guy was a double agent. It goes with the territory. Why would I care one way or the other ?

Breaking news - joy rider dies in high speed chase.

Putin is nothing but a modern dictator.
Unfortunately, because of the size and importance of Russia in the today's world, and because of the current global crises, such as Syria or N. Korea, no one wants to confront with Putin and Russia's opposition is too weak now.
Because of this, Putin can do whatever he like, and it seems nobody can stop him now.

Times have changed drastically. Nowadays they can´t push their scams through garbage media. Nobody takes that seriously anymore. Social media is just too strong, people are fed up with one-sided propaganda.

Probably a plot to continue with the Russian sanctions and embargoes. Countries such as France and Italy want to remove the sanctions, as their agricultural sector has been hit hard. The Germans are more or less neutral on this. The pro-US camp is able to get support only from the United Kingdom, in addition to the Russophobe states in the Baltics.

It´s a part of the smear campaign. And it´s desperation. At this point almost nobody believes the propaganda behind the Russia sanctions. So, it´s just more propaganda. Whether it´s true or not is never a concern where it originates.
It´s just about interests.

The UK is kidding itself.
What makes them think this judgement is even going to make a difference to Russia?

Fair enough.  My quick research indicates that you are at least mostly correct.  I see no backup for my understanding that maintaining modern nuclear stockpiles involves refreshing polonium triggers or any other such material.  I thank you for the corrections.

My recollection of the poisoning was that the production of the polonium was not long after it's production (due to the half-life which you mention.)  I guessed (probably incorrectly) that the production involved refining of material from a fusion reactor, but it's an equally valid assumption that neutron bombardment from other sources could produce the material as well.

In my defense, I would say that while the unit cost of products resulting from neutron bombardment (either within a fusion reactor or otherwise) may be cheap, and especially if they are byproducts, operation of such a process is probably not, and it probably is under scrutiny of the IAEA except possibly in the strongest of the nuclear powers or in a non-cooperative state such as North Korea.

That's false, polonium is widely used for the civil applications. Just for example, millions of polonium-based antistatic brushes are sold every day.



Well, that is false as well. Though the polonium-based neutron sources are used in laboratories, polonium isn't used in the modern nuclear weapons due to short period of half-life. There is a plenty of more suitable methods of initiation.

Polonium is produced in the nuclear reactors, via irradiation of bismuth-209 with thermal neutrons. This process is very simple and production cost is quite low, price for 500 mCi sample of polonium is only about $36 in the USA. By the way, 500 mCi is more than enough to get rid of somebody.

There are no specific international treaties, which would regulate production of polonium. In fact, there are even no utilization procedures for used polonium sources, it is allowed to dispose of them with regular household rubbish.

Britain had more motivation to kill Aleksandr Litvinenko than Russia, brother claims

Published time: 22 Jan, 2016 12:22
Edited time: 22 Jan, 2016 15:35

The brother of Aleksandr Litvinenko says the UK government had more motivation to kill him than Russia did, despite a British public inquiry which concluded that President Putin “probably” approved the assassination.
Maksim Litvinenko, Aleksandr's younger brother who lives in Rimini, Italy, responded to the Thursday report by saying it was “ridiculous” to blame the Kremlin for the murder of his brother, stating that he believes British security services had more of a motive to carry out the assassination.

"My father and I are sure that the Russian authorities are not involved. It's all a set-up to put pressure on the Russian government,” Litvinenko told the Mirror, adding that such reasoning is the only explanation as to why the inquiry was launched 10 years after his brother's death.

He called the British report a “smear” on Putin, and stressed that rumors claiming his brother was an enemy of the state are false. He added that Aleksandr had planned to return to Russia, and had even told friends about the move.


Litvinenko went on to downplay his brother’s alleged role as a spy, working for either Russia or MI6, adding that the Western media is to blame for such characterization.

"The Russians had no reason to want Alexander dead,” he said. “My brother was not a spy, he was more like a policeman...he was in the FSB [Russian Federal Security Service] but he worked against organized crime, murders, arms trafficking, stuff like that.”

Litvinenko was murdered in London in 2006, when assassins allegedly slipped radioactive polonium 21 into his cup of tea at a hotel. But his brother Maksim cast doubt on whether that was actually the poison used, saying he believes it could have been planted to frame the Russians.

"I believe he could have been killed by another poison, maybe thallium, which killed him slowly, and the polonium was planted afterwards,” he said. He added that requests to have his brother's body exhumed, in order to verify the presence of polonium, have been ignored by Britain.

"Now after 10 years any trace [of polonium] would have disappeared anyway, so we will never know,” he said, adding that British authorities had not collaborated with Russian investigators on the case.

“This case became a big PR campaign against the Russian government and its president in particular,” Maksim Litvinenko told RT in an interview in 2014. “The West is pressuring Russia very hard now. The MH-17 crash, Crimea, the war in Ukraine, sanctions against Moscow and now this inquiry – I'm not buying that this is a coincidence.”

When asked why Aleksandr Litvinenko's widow Marina continues to maintain that the Kremlin is responsible for the murder, he said: “She lives in London, to survive she has to play the game and take this point of view. She can't say anything else."


Back in 2012, Litvinenko’s father backtracked on his claims that Vladimir Putin was responsible for his son's death, and asked the Russian president for forgiveness. Walter Litvinenko told RT that his anger had made him say what the Western media wanted to hear.


Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Ministry has also dismissed the British report, blaming London for politicizing the “purely criminal” case of Litvinenko's death.

Russia’s UK ambassador, Alexander Yakovenko, told RT that the inquiry's conclusion was “not justified,” and that the investigation was “very politicized” and “biased.”

“In order to prove something, you have to present the facts. As soon as the British side proves…their conclusions, we will be ready to consider [them],” the ambassador said, adding that the Russian side “did not even have a chance to study the documents [of the investigation].”

https://www.rt.com/news/329804-litvinenko-brother-britain-murder/

Using polonium-210 is indicative that the perp wanted to make sure that it was clear that the assassination was under the direction of the government of a nuclear power.  Polonium-210 is (as far as I can tell) only available to those engaged in maintaining nuclear weapon stockpiles as it is necessary to maintain 'pits' for nuclear weapons and is damn challenging to make (and fairly tightly regulated by international weapons treaty frameworks.)  I always figured that it was probably a Russian hit and that they wanted to make it widely known.  An alternate hypothesis is that the Russians were framed.  Both hypotheses seem reasonable to me.

Putin is no different than any other state thug, He bristles when others identify him for what he is, an overachieving thug.

The Craziest Conspiracy Theory of Them All
The British government’s report on the death of Alexander Litvinenko reads like a bad thriller

by Justin Raimondo, January 22, 2016

[links in article]

To those of us who grew up during the cold war years, it’s just like old times again: Russian plots to subvert the West and poison our precious bodily fluids are apparently everywhere. Speaking of poisoning plots: the latest Russkie conspiracy – and the most imaginative by far – was the alleged assassination by poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko , a former agent of the Russian intelligence services who fled to the West to become a professional anti-Russian propagandist and conspiracy theorist with a talent for the improbable. According to his fantastic worldview, the many terrorist attacks that have occurred in Russia have all been committed by … Vladimir Putin. Aside from championing the Chechen Islamo-terrorists who actually committed these crimes, Litvinenko’s stock-in-trade was an elaborate conspiracy theory in which he regularly accused Putin of blowing up Russian apartment buildings and murdering schoolchildren and then diverting attention from his own nefarious plots by blaming those lovable Chechens. Not very believable – unless one is predisposed to believe anything, so long as it casts discredit on those satanic Russians.

The conspiracy theory promulgated by the British government – and now memorialized in this official report – surpasses anything the deceased fantasist might have come up with. According to the Brits, Litvinenko was poisoned on British soil whilst imbibing a cup of tea spiked with a massive dose of radioactive polonium-210 – and, since Russia is a prime source of this rare substance, and since the Russians were supposedly out to get Litvinenko, the FSB – successor to the KGB – is named as the “probable” culprit.

Looking at the report, one has to conclude that they don’t make propaganda the way they used to: the certitude of, say, a J. Edgar Hoover or a Robert Welch has given way to the tepid ambiguity of Lord Robert Owen, the author of this report, whose verdict of “probably” merely underscores the paucity of what passes for evidence in this case.

To begin with, if the Russians wanted to off Litvinenko, why would they poison him with a substance that left a radioactive trail traceable from Germany to Heathrow airport – and, in the process, contaminating scores of hotel rooms, offices, planes, restaurants, and homes?  Why not just put a bullet through his head? It makes no sense.

But then conspiracy theories don’t have to make sense: they just have to take certain assumptions all the way to their implausible conclusions. If one starts with the premise that Putin and the Russians are a Satanic force capable of anything, and incompetent to boot, then it’s all perfectly “logical” – in the Bizarro World, at any rate.

The idea that Litvinenko was a dangerous opponent of the Russian government who had to be killed because he posed a credible threat to the existence of the regime is laughable: practically no one inside Russia knew anything about him, and as for his crackpot “truther” theories about how Putin was behind every terrorist attack ever carried out within Russia’s borders – to assert that they had any credence outside of the Western media echo chamber is a joke. So there was no real motive for the FSB to assassinate him, just as there is none for the FBI to go after David Ray Griffin.

The British report doesn’t bother presenting any real evidence: instead, we are given a detailed account of the lives of the alleged killers – Dmitri Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoy – that reads like a Daily Mail article. Included in this compendium of character assassination and gossip is the testimony of one of Kovtun’s ex-wives that he “wanted to be a porno star.” That this factoid would find its way into an official report of the United Kingdom is extraordinary – but not, I fear, unexpected. Salaciousness has its place in contemporary fiction, particularly the pulp-thriller genre, of which this report is a prime (if pedestrian) example.

The rest of the report is a complicated account of every move Kovtun, Lugovoy, and Litvinenko made in the days leading up to Litvinenko’s poisoning. It neither compromises nor exonerates the accused: presumably it was included to give the report the appearance of substance. The meat of the matter – the real “evidence” – is hidden behind a veil of secrecy. Lord Owen’s inquiry was for the most part conducted in secret closed  hearings, with testimony given by anonymous witnesses, and this is central to the “evidence” that is supposed to convict Kovtun, Lugovoy, and the Russian government. Lord Owen, explains it this way:

“Put very shortly, the closed evidence consists of evidence that is relevant to the Inquiry, but which has been assessed as being too sensitive to put into the public domain. The assessment that the material is sufficiently sensitive to warrant being treated as closed evidence in these proceedings has been made not by me, but by the Home Secretary. She has given effect to this decision by issuing a number of Restriction Notices, which is a procedure specified in section 19 of the Inquiries Act 2005. The Restriction Notices themselves, although not, of course, the sensitive documents appended to them, are public documents. They have been published on the Inquiry website and are also to be found at Appendix 7 to this Report.”

In other words, the “evidence” is not for us ordinary mortals to see. We just have to take His Lordship’s word for it that the Russian government embarked on an improbable assassination mission against a marginal figure that reads like something Ian Fleming might have written under a pseudonym.

Yes, you might say, but Litvinenko was poisoned. So who killed him?

As I pointed out here:

“Litvinenko was an employee of exiled Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky – whose ill-gotten empire included a Russian syndicate of car-dealerships that had more than a nodding acquaintance with the Chechen Mafia – but was being slowly cut out of the money pipeline. Big-hearted Boris, who had initially put him on the payroll as anti-Putin propagandist, was evidently getting sick of him, and the out-of-work "dissident" was reportedly desperate for money. Litvinenko had several " business meetings " with Lugovoi in the months prior to his death, and, according to this report , he hatched a blackmail scheme targeting several well-known Russian tycoons and government officials.”

Indeed, Litvinenko, in the months before his death, had targeted several well-known members of the Russian Mafia with his blackmail scheme. That they would take umbrage at this is hardly shocking.

Furthermore, there are indications that Litvinenko was engaged in the smuggling of nuclear materials. That he wound up being contaminated by the goods he was peddling on the black market seems far more credible than the cock-and-bull story about a vast Russian plot originating in the Kremlin,. Apparently Lord Owen has never heard of Occam’s Razor.

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2016/01/21/craziest-conspiracy-theory/

Not at all. Just saying that he's not worse than most of our Western world, exactly like you said he's just a Bush ^^