Putin administration's critic poisoned

Corruption is a way of life in Russia. Always has been, probably always will be. No different then it was under the czars or the communists.

That being said I'm not convinced that both the current instances you cited were attempted assassinations by Putin or his cronies. The due date for the ideal time of whacking both this guy and Anna Politkovskaya had long since passed. While I'd have to be blind to ignore the crackdown on dissent going on in Russia right now, neither of these two people could really do anything to hurt Putin.

Anna Politkovskaya was involved in exposing what happened to the Chechen terrorists/insurgents. Guess what happened there? Nothing. Most Russians supported what was done in Chechneya. Putin told the rest of the world to mind it's business. And we did.... mostly. I'm guessing that whatever this KGB defector knew was long since been milked out of him by British intelligence. So there's absolutely no motivation for attempting a hit on either. Being critical of the regime outside the country does not cut it.

So unless it can be proved this guy was holding something important back, this is all just tinfoil hat nonsense. All defectors think they're gonna be murdered. Very few of them are.

The sole motivation of this would be to apply political pressure on the Russians for some reason. My guess on the situation that needs such leverage is the whole economic spat over development/distribution of Russia's natural resources continues. Any one or combination of the examples Styphon listed would do.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by Skexis

I mean, come on, thallium found in his system? Hair loss? I wouldn't call that food poisoning. (Well, literally, maybe)

You misunderstand. I'm saying that -if- he was poisoned it wasn't because of his investigation or criticism of past issues. That's not a clear motivation for murdering a defector, because frankly the limited damage is already done.

Maybe it is something that would be more personally damaging to Putin?

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:...07/05/01.shtml

So we have Litvinenko writing personal things about Putin. He probably has evidence of such allegations correct? There you go a bigger and better motivation for an attempted murder. This was back in July though. Which is what motivated the whole "the due date for whacking him is long since past" statement. Truthfully, we'll never know. Everyone is grasping at straws.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by ramoth

Watts's link is really interesting though. If there's any more about this, I would like to see it. The Chechen Press doesn't seem like the best source to get an unbiased, journalistic view of Putin (hello, propaganda).

Sadly, that's all I could find of recent note. I'm assuming that because it wasn't on the main site, and I found it via internet cache it was deleted due to libel concerns. Given the tone of the article it's not a huge stretch of the imagination that's the case.

How ya doing, buddy?