Former KGB Chief Putin Poisoning Opponents?

Vladimir Putin is presently posing next to his good buddy George W. Bush, who famously claimed that he could read the measure of the Russian leader by the look in his eyes. I recall Richard Nixon saying much the same about Spiro Agnew, when explaining why he picked such a schnook for Vice President. Spiro ended up accepting bags full of cash from Maryland State Troopers. Putin is poisoning his enemies, apparently. The Financial Times bravely prints a piece that will not be picked up by the American MSM, as that might harm their access, as Eason Jordan eased up on Saddam to keep his CNN pundits in Baghdad.

The latest victim of Putin's poisonous wrath now lies in serious condition in a London hospital. Mr Litvinenko, who served the FSB until 1999, had dinner with a so-called informant who promised to reveal the details of the shooting death of an investigative reporter whom he previously [see below] tried to poison, but failed. As a change of pace and to remove suspicion, Putin had her shot several times at close range.

Old Russian Proverb: "No person, no problem." Joseph Vissarionivich Stalin, who also asked how many battalions the Pope had. Moral probity seems to continue to be a problem in post-Soviet Russia, as the rest of the article indicates.

His poisoning conjures up memories of several mysterious incidents involving opponents of Mr Putin in recent years. Victor Yushchenko, now Ukrainian president, was poisoned by dioxin in 2004 while running a presidential campaign against the Kremlin-backed Victor Yanukovich. He fell ill after having dinner with leaders of the Ukrainian security services.

A year earlier, Yuri Shchekochikhin, one of Russia’s most respected investigative journalists and a member of parliament, died from a severe allergic reaction. He was also the deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta, which investigated corruption and alleged involvement of Russia’s security services in a series of apartment bombings in Moscow in 1999. His colleagues were convinced he died of poisoning.

Ms Politkovskaya, who also worked for Novaya Gazeta until her murder, had earlier been poisoned when she drank tea on a flight to Beslan, where a hostage crisis was unfolding.

Claims by KGB defectors that the FSB might have been involved in some or all of these cases were never proven. Allegations of poison attacks hark back to the Soviet era when, in 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, was murdered in London with a poison-tipped umbrella. "The view inside our agency was that poison is just another weapon, like a pistol," Mr Litvinenko, who served the FSB until 1999, told the New York Times in 2004. He said a secret KGB laboratory specialising in poison was still operational in the FSB.

While still in the service, Mr Litvinenko in 1998 told Boris Berezovsky, one of the most controversial oligarchs of the 1990s, that he was under orders to kill him. Mr Putin, then still FSB chief, reacted angrily. Since then, Mr Litvinenko who sought political asylum in the UK in 2000, has been closely associated with Mr Berezovsky, now in exile in London and a sworn enemy of President Putin.

My guess is that Mr. Litvinenko had better not get in an elevator alone, as Ms Politkovskaya injudiciously did with a man caught on security tape who filled her full of lead. Strangely, no leads on the mysterious man have turned up. Even Stalin knew enough to find another stooge to accuse of such murders and then run over with a car.

That was the previous method of "liquidation" by the Nomenklatura of its enemies.

FURTHER COMMENT: The blog of Gideon Rachman prances and minces around the subject of Putin's venomous temper and notes that The Independent has doubts whether Putin was involved. The Independent is to the left of The Guardian and has never been accused of journalism, except on the very rare occasions when the ultra-left position on anything has been actually correct.

And those brave Eurocrats have to sit down with Czarevitch Vlad the Empoisoner next week. Hopefully, they will have food tasters as in Medieval times to keep him from knocking off these doughty culture warriors.

Oops, wrong tape. The Eurobunnies will be simpering and cowering about natural gas prices and would never dare raise a whimper or a whine about Vlad's poison policies. Or so the Olympian Gideon opines.

Still, I would not want to be the Financial Times correspondent in Moscow.