Who Poisoned Alexander Litvinenko? Radioactive thallium link

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Re: Who Poisoned Alexander Litvinenko? Radioactive thallium

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed May 02, 2018 5:20 pm

Spain reduces term for Russian Senator Reznik suspected in connections with mafia

23:00 / 09.04.2018
Spain reduces term for Russian Senator Reznik suspected in connections with mafia
Vladislav Reznik
The state prosecutor asks to sentence a Russian parliamentarian, who is a defendant in the case of the Russian mafia, to five years in prison and a fine of € 30 million.

The Spanish prosecutor's office has revised the sentence terms for several persons involved in the case of the Russian mafia. Now, the prosecution requests five years and four and a half years for State Duma deputy Vladislav Reznik and his wife Diana Gindin, respectively.

Earlier, the prosecutor's office requested a period of six months more.

According to the prosecution, the defendants in the case laundered money in Spain through the creation of companies related to real estate. Of the 27 accused, 18 ended up on the dock. The alleged leaders of the criminal group, Gennady Petrov, and Aleksander Malyshev, left the country.

As for the State Duma deputy and his wife, they are accused of illegally purchasing real estate in Mallorca. Initially, the prosecutors asked five and a half years in prison and a fine of € 100 million for them. Now, Mrs. Gindin is asked to be sentenced to 4.5 years in prison and a fine of € 5 million.

The terms the prosecutors asked for the remaining accused vary from two years and three months to three years and ten months of imprisonment and fines of € 65 million to € 1.

Terms for those who are hiding from justice remained unchanged. The prosecution asks to sentence Gennady Petrov, Aleksander Malyshev and his wife Olga Solovyova to eight and a half years in prison, the rest face five and a half years. The defense insists on justification.
https://en.crimerussia.com/gromkie-dela ... ty-reznik/


Prosecutor José Grinda shows threatening letter from Russian mafia in Spanish court

17:45 / 11.04.2018
Madrid Court accepted the letter with threats from Ilya Traber to the prosecutor as evidence the defendants are guilty.

Spanish anti-mafia prosecutor José Grinda, who led the Troika operation against the Russian mafia, said that no threats were going to stop him from doing his job as a public official.

At the Madrid hearings of the case of money laundering by the Tambovsko-Malyshevskaya criminal syndicate, prosecution showed a letter dated October 7, 2016. In it, the then Prosecutor General of Spain Consuelo Madrigal Martínez-Pereda warned the then Security Minister Francisco Martinez that the gang had voiced "direct threats" to the family of Prosecutor Grinda. Ilya Traber, one of the accused, wrote the letter. The session judge Maria Angeles Barreiro accepted the letter as evidence in the criminal case under consideration. José Grinda said that the Spanish prosecutor's office would never submit to threats like those.

The case file refers to Ilya Traber as an active member of an organized criminal group, a criminal boss, the leader of the Vyborg crime syndicate and a Mallorca resident. His name is associated with the "night governor" of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Barsukov (Kumarin). Traber was allegedly used by Gennady Petrov, one of the leaders of the Tambovsko-Malyshevskaya to reach the State Duma deputy Vladislav Reznik.

When asked about it, Reznik admitted he had been friends with Traber in his youth, and said the man had introduced him to Petrov. The deputy also admitted that he had purchased real estate in Spain, but denies it was in any way associated with corruption. Reznik argues that the businessman Ilya Traber was the one who had offered him to buy a house in Mallorca. Reznik said that upon arrival in the Balearic Islands, he bought a house from a company Petrov owned. The house cost 1.2 million euros, Reznik said, and the transfer was made from his personal bank account. The deputy stressed that the money had been declared and all taxes had been paid. "I’ve never been given anything for free, and I paid my own money for it; I do not have any criminal money," Reznik said in court.

Further, Reznik said he had met Gennady Petrov in Mallorca and knew him as a successful businessman who was a "shareholder of the Baltic Construction Company" with his own retail chain.

According to the Prosecutor's Office, Reznik himself was a member of Petrov’s gang, where he was in charge of the group’s interaction with the Russian authorities, traded in communications, collected confidential information, etc. Petrov used Reznik’s influence to put the “right” people in the key positions of the Russian government. He represented the mafia in Russian ministries and departments, law enforcement and customs bodies, as well as in banks and influential corporations.

The prosecution reviewed the term of imprisonment given to Reznik earlier. Now it argues for 5 years and 4.5 years for the deputy and his wife Diana Gindin, respectively. Earlier, the Prosecutor's Office had requested the court to impose terms of imprisonment six months longer for each of them. Besides, the prosecution insists on a €30 million fine the Russian parliamentarian is to pay.
https://en.crimerussia.com/organizedcri ... sh-court-/
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Re: Who Poisoned Alexander Litvinenko? Radioactive thallium

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 07, 2018 7:43 pm

Murdered Russian exile survived earlier poisoning attempt, police believe

Exclusive: Nikolai Glushkov spoke of collapse in Bristol hotel after meeting two Russians

Luke HardingFri 7 Sep 2018 12.30 EDT
Detectives investigating the murder of a Russian exile in London believe he was previously the target of a poisoning attempt carried out by two mysterious men from Moscow who visited him in a Bristol hotel room, the Guardian has learned.

Nikolai Glushkov, a friend of the late oligarch Boris Berezovsky and a prominent Kremlin critic, was found dead in March at his home in New Malden, south-west London. He had been strangled.

Glushkov is now thought to have survived a previous attempt to kill him by poisoning in 2013, the Guardian can reveal. Detectives are reinvestigating the incident as part of their inquiry into Glushkov’s murder, which took place a week after the novichok poisoning in Salisbury of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

The revelation has emerged in the week that Scotland Yard named two Russian suspects in the Skripal attack as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. The names are believed to be fake. Theresa May told MPs this week that both were career officers working for Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency.

May’s claim that the operation to kill the Skripals was sanctioned “at a senior level” by the Russian state has prompted furious denials by Moscow. The Kremlin says it sees no reason to pursue Petrov and Boshirov, who presented genuine Russian passports when they flew on 2 March from Moscow to Gatwick airport.

In contrast to the Skripal investigation, which successfully tracked the two Russians on CCTV, detectives working on the Glushkov investigation have struggled to find leads and are yet to identify any compellingsuspects, it is understood.

Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command has released CCTV footage of a black van spotted around the time of Glushkov’s murder on 11 March. Officers are working on the theory that Glushkov may, like the Skripals, have been a victim of a professional assassin or assassins sent by Russia’s spy agencies.

As part of their inquiries police are re-examining a suspected attempt on Glushkov’s life in early November 2013, six months after Glushkov publicly accused the Kremlin of murdering Berezovsky. Berezovsky had been found dead at his ex-wife’s house near Ascot.

Glushkov told friends he first met the two Russians at Schiphol airport in the Netherlands. He was apprehensive about the encounter and picked the venue because of its CCTV coverage. He subsequently came across them again during a trip to Bristol, when he was staying at the Grand Hotel in Broad Street.

Police set up a cordon outside Glushkov’s suburban home following his death in March.
Police set up a cordon outside Glushkov’s suburban home following his death in March. Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA
Glushkov gave a graphic account of what happened to Keith Carr, a paramedic with the South Western ambulance service. Glushkov told Carr the Russians approached him and bought a bottle of champagne from the hotel bar. Glushkov agreed to drink it with them even though “he didn’t really know them”.

Carr said he was called to the hotel the next morning to deal with a “collapse”. “I found Nikolai on the floor of his hotel room. He was able to stand up with help. He looked a bit tottery. We sat him on the bed.

“I asked him what had happened. He told me that he and the two Russians had been drinking the champagne together the previous evening. He went off to the loo and when he came back he drank more champagne. The next thing he remembered was waking up on the carpet the next morning. He had carpet burns on his face and on his chest.”

Glushkov told Carr he believed the Russians had poisoned him. He explained that he was a likely target because of his lifelong friendship with the late Berezovsky. Two police constables – a man and a woman – were in the room at the time. They were sceptical of his claim, Carr said.

He added: “At the time I don’t think anybody gave any credibility to what he was saying. Nikolai told me: ‘I’ve been given something. I don’t know what it is.’”

Boris Berezovsky
Boris Berezovsky was found hanged in March 2013. Glushkov was convinced his friend would not have killed himself. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
Glushkov was “quite lucid”, the paramedic said. He tested Glushkov with an electrocardiogram machine and the readings were strange. “It showed a very unusual cardiac rhythm. I know about 16 of them but I didn’t recognise it. It was irregular and fast. Too fast for someone who is not doing anything.”

Glushkov was taken by ambulance to Bristol Royal infirmary. His daughter Natalia travelled to the hospital and he was later transferred to a private clinic near London. “Glushkov told me the men just turned up at his hotel,” Carr said, adding that this was the only case of an alleged deliberate poisoning he had seen in four decades with the ambulance service.

Avon and Somerset police confirmed they attended a “suspicious incident” at the hotel and investigated, No charges were brought. It is understood Glushkov declined to cooperate with authorities.

In the 1980s and 1990s Glushkov worked closely with Berezovsky and became Aeroflot’s chief financial officer. In this role he attracted the ire of senior figures after clamping down on alleged corruption schemes. In 2000 Berezovsky fell out with Vladimir Putin and fled to London. Soon afterwards Glushkov was arrested in Moscow.

He got out of prison in 2004, moved to the UK, and was granted political asylum. In exile Glushkov was one of a group of anti-Putin emigrés, most of whom are now dead. They included Alexander Litvinenko, who was murdered in 2006 with radioactive tea, and the Georgian billionaire Badri Patarkatsishvili, who died in 2008 of an apparent heart attack.

In 2011 Glushkov gave evidence in a $5bn legal suit brought by Berezovsky against the oligarch Roman Abramovich. Berezovsky lost. He was found hanged in March 2013. Police decided the case was suicide. Glushkov was convinced Berezovsky was incapable of killing himself, telling the Guardian: “The deaths of too many Russian exiles are happening.”

In 2015 Glushkov attended the public inquiry into the murder of Litvinenko, whom he knew well. It concluded that Putin had “probably” ordered the assassination.

His own death by strangulation occurred on the eve of another hearing in London. Aeroflot accused Glushkov of fraud and spent more than seven years litigating against him, in what he believed was a politically motivated campaign by the Kremlin. On the morning of 12 March he failed to turn up to court.

Q&A
Does Russia present a credible threat to the UK?

At about 10.30pm that evening his daughter Natalia and his former civil partner Denis Trushin called at his home in Clarence Avenue and found his body. A murder inquiry was launched when a postmortem revealed he had died from compression to the neck.

Aeroflot abruptly discontinued the case. The judge, Mrs Justice Rose, described the airline’s conduct towards Glushkov’s family after his death as “shameful” and awarded costs against it.

Glushkov had been well aware of the dangers of accepting hospitality from strangers. In a telephone conversation with the Guardian in 2013, Glushkov said Berezovsky had often been cavalier about his own safety, and was indiscriminate about the kinds of people he met, some of them spies or agents dispatched by Moscow.

“Meeting these people is dangerous,” he said. “Whatever drink you take with them is dangerous.”

So far detectives have examined hours of CCTV footage, taken 286 witness statements and seized 1,086 exhibits. Their murder investigation is called Operation Bulblet. The counter-terrorism unit took charge of the inquiry “because of the associations Mr Glushkov is believed to have had”, Scotland Yard said.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... pt-bristol
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Re: Who Poisoned Alexander Litvinenko? Radioactive thallium

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Sep 12, 2018 6:33 pm

First it was his vision, then his speech, and then his legs’ Pussy Riot member Pyotr Verzilov is hospitalized in critical condition and friends fear he was poisoned
Meduza15:51, 12 september 2018

Anton Novoderezhkin / TASS / Scanpix / LETA
Pyotr Verzilov, a member of Pussy Riot and one of the publishers of the independent news website Mediazona, was hospitalized in critical condition late on September 11. His partner, Veronika Nikulshina, told Meduza that he’s started losing his sight, speech, and mobility.

Pyotr Verzilov is currently receiving treatment at the toxicology wing of Moscow’s Bakhrushin City Clinical Hospital. Verzilov’s friends told Meduza that his mother came to the hospital on the evening of September 12, but staff wouldn’t let her see her son, and even refused to describe his condition or inform her about his preliminary diagnosis. “[At the hospital] they said they don’t have the right to disclose any information… They sent her away and were rude. They said they can’t admit her. They kept pointing at this sheet of paper, saying that they can’t disclose [any information] until the patient signs a release himself, but he’s unconscious,” Verzilov’s friend told Meduza.

According to Nikulshina, Verzilov started feeling unwell shortly after a court hearing on Tuesday. At six in the evening, he laid down to rest. Two hours later, when Nikulshina got home, Verzilov “woke up and said he was starting to lose his sight.” “Between eight and ten, his condition got exponentially worse. First it was his vision, then his ability to speak, and then his ability to walk,” she told Meduza.

“When the paramedics arrived, he answered all their questions, saying, ‘No, I didn’t eat anything. No, I didn’t take anything.’ He was getting worse even faster, and then he started convulsing. On the way [to the hospital], in the ambulance, he was already babbling. [...] He fell into such a half-asleep, half-unconscious state that he stopped responding to me and didn’t even recognize me anymore,” Veronika Nikulshina told Meduza.

Nikulshina says the doctors’ original analysis “didn’t turn up anything bad,” but around 1 a.m. they suddenly moved Verzilov to the hospital’s toxicology wing. Staff refused to tell her if he’d been diagnosed with “poisoning,” explaining that her status as his common-law wife “doesn’t entitle her to any rights.” “The doctor only said that his condition was serious, but his behavior was improving and he’d started responding to his own name,” Nikulshina said.

Pyotr Verzilov became a public figure in Russia in the late 2000s as a member of the “Voina” artist-activist group, where he performed demonstrations with his then wife, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. In 2012, Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich became international celebrities when they were tried and convicted of “premeditated hooliganism performed by an organized group of people motivated by religious hatred or hostility.” During the trial, Verzilov presented himself as Pussy Riot’s “producer.” In this role, he helped generate global media attention for the group, recruiting dozens of world-famous musicians to pledge their support for Pussy Riot. In 2014, Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina established the news website Mediazona, which conducts often daring reporting on Russia's criminal justice system, with Verzilov as its publisher.

VERZILOV'S WORLD CUP DEMONSTRATION
Sometimes he misses the Stalinist '30s What the police told the Pussy Riot activists after they stormed the World Cup soccer field
On July 15, 2018, Verzilov, Nikulshina, and two other activists raided the soccer field during the World Cup final game, interrupting play. The four were dressed as police cadets, and the demonstration was carried out as an action by Pussy Riot. Their punishment was 15 days in jail.
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2018/09/12 ... aign=share
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Re: Who Poisoned Alexander Litvinenko? Radioactive thallium

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Sep 18, 2018 12:58 pm

Doctors: ‘Highly plausible’ Pussy Riot member was poisoned
BY BRETT SAMUELS - 09/18/18 09:35 AM EDT 27

Doctors treating a member of the punk protest group Pussy Riot said Tuesday that it's "highly plausible" he was poisoned, but expect the individual to recover, The Associated Press reported.

Doctors in Berlin's Charite hospital told reporters that Pyotr Verzilov, who is part of the Russian musical group, has been in intensive care since Saturday. The doctors said his symptoms make it "highly plausible that a poisoning took place," but they're unsure how it would have taken place.

Doctors said the symptoms Verzilov was experiencing could have been caused by a number of substances, including some pharmaceuticals and plants with certain toxins.


Verzilov was hospitalized in Moscow last week after losing his sight, hearing and mobility. Friends and fellow Pussy Riot members quickly suggested he was the victim of a poisoning.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, another Pussy Riot member and Verzilov’s wife, told German newspaper Bild that she believes her husband was the victim of an intentional poisoning, according to Reuters.

A human rights group based in Germany paid to transport Verzilov to Berlin’s Charite hospital, where he arrived by medical transport plane on Saturday.

Verzilov was one of several Pussy Riot members who rushed the field at the World Cup final in Moscow earlier this year.

The group became an international household name after two of its members were imprisoned in 2012 for protests against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing ... s-poisoned
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Re: Who Poisoned Alexander Litvinenko? Radioactive thallium

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 26, 2018 9:07 am

seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 16, 2017 10:40 am wrote:
Putin critic says he's one of the lucky ones: "I'm still here"

2017
Mar 12

Questions continue to surround the role Russia may have played in President Trump’s election last fall, and about the president’s professed admiration for Vladimir Putin’s skills as a strong leader.

What the president doesn’t talk about is the unfortunate fate that stalks some of Putin’s most prominent critics. They have been victims of unsolved shootings, suspicious suicides and poisonings. Tonight, the story of one of them.

Vladimir Kara-Murza was an opposition activist, on the front lines, protesting Putin’s policies, organizing demonstrations and town hall meetings. He knew he was on a dangerous mission. When we met him last year, he told us that one day in May 2015, he learned just how dangerous.

Vladimir Kara-Murza: I was in a work meeting with my colleagues in Moscow, when I suddenly started to feel really sick. And I went, within about 20 minutes, from feeling completely normal to feeling like a very sick man. Then I don’t remember anything for the next month.

“I have absolutely no doubt that this was a deliberate poisoning, that it was intended to kill...” Vladimir Kara-Murza
Lesley Stahl: You were out for a month?

Vladimir Kara-Murza: I was in a coma for a week, and I don’t remember anything for a month and had basically a cascade of all my major life organs failing, one after another; just switching off you know the lungs, the heart, the kidneys.

Poisoned again? What 60 Minutes learned about Russia's "love of poison" 60 MINUTES OVERTIME
Poisoned again? What 60 Minutes learned about Russia's "love of poison"
He was shuttled from hospital to hospital in Moscow for two days as doctors frantically tried to figure out what was wrong with him.

Vladimir Kara-Murza: I was at one point connected, I think to eight different artificial life support machines and doctors told my wife that there’s only gonna be about a five percent chance that I’ll survive.

But he beat the odds. When we spoke with him last year, he’d been recovering for a year, but he was still walking with a limp from nerve damage.

Lesley Stahl: So what happened?

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Well, it was some kind of a very strong toxin. We don’t know what it was because, you know, with these things, as people who know more about this than I do explained to me, you basically have to know exactly what you’re testing for in order to find it.

Lesley Stahl: So they never found the exact compound?

Vladimir Kara-Murza: They never did.

It wasn’t until the fourth day, and after he had been on a dialysis machine, that blood was drawn and sent to a toxicology lab in France. It found heavy metals in his blood, but no specific toxin. Still Kara-Murza maintains that he was poisoned.

Vladimir Kara-Murza: I have absolutely no doubt that this was a deliberate poisoning, that it was intended to kill because, as I mentioned already, the doctors told my wife that it’s about a five percent chance of survival. And when it’s that kind of percentage, it’s not to scare. It’s to kill.

Lesley Stahl: Can you be sure that what happened to you was directed by Mr. Putin?

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Well of that we have no idea. I don’t know the precise circumstances, I don’t know the who or the how, but I do know the why.

In recent years quite a few of Putin’s enemies have perished by swallowing things they shouldn’t have. In 2006, Russian-spy-turned-Kremlin-critic Alexander Litvinenko drank tea laced with polonium-210. Two years earlier the Ukrainian politician Viktor Yushchenko had somehow ingested dioxin. He survived but was disfigured.

But what would the motive be in the case of the critic Vladimir Kara-Murza? Cambridge educated, he was for years a Washington-based reporter for a Russian TV station. So he was well-connected and had perfect English, which he used to incessantly criticize the regime on the international stage.

kara-murza.jpg
Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian opposition activist, speaks at a demonstration.
Vladimir Kara-Murza: A government that is based on genuine support does not need to jail its opponents.

As if his outspokenness wasn’t enough to anger the Kremlin, he made matters worse for himself when he joined forces with this man.

Bill Browder: It’s death if you cross the Putin regime.

Bill Browder was for years the largest foreign investor in Russia and Putin’s champion. But he turned into a dogged adversary when his Russian tax attorney Sergei

Magnitsky blew the whistle on alleged large-scale theft by government officials.

kremlin-moscow.jpg
Moscow, Russia CBS NEWS
Bill Browder: We discovered massive corruption of the Putin regime. Sergei exposed it, testified against officials involved. He was subsequently arrested, put in pre-trial detention, tortured for 358 days and killed at the age of 37.

Browder was so outraged, he joined with Vladimir Kara-Murza to lobby the U.S. Congress for a law targeting those responsible for that death and other human rights violations. They succeeded: the Magnitsky Act passed in 2012. It is the first law that sanctions individual Russians, 44 so far.

Bill Browder: The Magnitsky Act is designed to sanction, to freeze the assets and to ban the visas for people who commit these types of crimes in Russia.

Lesley Stahl: So they can’t get their money which may be stashed in the United States.

Bill Browder: And so Vladimir Putin is extremely angry that the Magnitsky was going to be passed. He was even angrier when it got passed. And he was angrier when people started getting added, names started getting added to the Magnitsky list.

One reason Vladimir Kara-Murza is convinced he was targeted is because six people connected to the Magnitsky case, as he was, have ended up dead. One of them was Boris Nemtsov, a leader of Russia’s opposition and Kara-Murza’s partner in lobbying for the Magnitsky Act.

Vladimir Kara-Murza: On the 27th of February 2015, he was killed by five bullets in the back as he was walking home, as he always did, out in the open, without bodyguards—

This was an assassination. In some of the deaths, proving there was foul play has been a challenge. Take the case of this Russian banker who came forward with incriminating documents related to the Magnitsky case.

Bill Browder: Alexander Perepilichny was a whistleblower. At the age of 44, he went jogging outside his home in Surrey, outside of London and dropped dead. The police deemed it an unsuspicious, natural death.

Lesley Stahl: Well, they did look for poison. They just couldn’t find any.

Bill Browder: They did a very first round toxicology screen. They didn’t find anything on the first run through.

Detecting poison can be extremely difficult. And there’s a reason: this Cold War CIA memo reveals that the Soviets ran a “laboratory for poisons […] in a large and super secret installation […] known as the chamber” to test undetectable compounds.

In the case of the banker in London, the coroner wasn’t willing to give up. He ordered more tests -- and three years later it was revealed in court that an exotic toxin was found with the help of an authority on flowers!

Bill Browder: A small sample of his stomach contents was sent to a botanical garden outside of London. And one of the scientists found a compound called Gelsemium Elegans which is a Chinese herb. They call it the heartbreak grass. And it causes a person to die unexpectedly without explanation.

Still, there’s no direct evidence of a Kremlin connection. But the list of those who’ve come to die unexpectedly after running afoul of Mr. Putin is long. Political opponents and human rights lawyers have been shot; rogue spies hunted down; overly inquisitive reporters have perished in mysterious plane crashes or by car bombs, by poison or gun-fire. Journalist reporter Anna Politkovskaya was poisoned and shot.

Then there are enemies who kill themselves, one by hanging, one by stabbing himself to death with two knives, and one by tying himself to a chair and jumping into a swimming pool. Some of Putin’s opponents are in prison, others forced out of the country like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, probably Putin’s most famous living critic.

Lesley Stahl: Are you afraid for your own life?

Image
Mikhail Khodorkovsky CBS NEWS
Mikhail Khodorkovsky: For a period of over 10 years, Vladimir Putin had ample opportunity to put an end to my life very easily, just by snapping his fingers. Today, it’s a little more difficult.

Khodorkovsky was once the richest man in Russia -- until he took to opposing Putin. He was put on trial, his oil company confiscated, and then thrown in prison for 10 years. Home is now London where he funds a Russian pro-democracy movement -- and this is where the plot thickens because one of his senior organizers on the ground in Russia is none other than Vladimir Kara-Murza.

Lesley Stahl: There are people who say that what’s happened to Kara-Murza is a message to you, a message to you to back off.’

Mikhail Khodorkovsky: You know, for 10 years, I was receiving lots of messages from our authorities of various sorts. And, some of these messages were rather unpleasant, concerning my physical well-being. But the authorities saw I ignored these messages. I would like to believe that they have not forgotten that.

In 2015, once Vladimir Kara-Murza was stabilized, he was flown to Washington DC to continue treatment near his wife, Evgenia, and their three kids who live in the U.S. for their safety. But as soon as Kara-Murza got better, he was itching to go back to Russia.

Yevgenia: I think what my husband believes in will always outweigh the fear, the paranoia.

Lesley Stahl: Even for you?

Yevgenia: You know, of course I’m terrified, but at the same time, you know, I married the guy 13 years ago and I knew what I was getting into.

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Well, you know, I think there’s nothing better this regime, the Putin regime, would like us to do than to give up and run away. And we’re not going to give him that pleasure. It’s our country.

Lesley Stahl: Even after being poisoned?

Vladimir Kara-Murza: It’s our country. We have to fight for it.
Image
Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza recovers in the hospital with his wife, Evgenia, at his bedside.
He told us this in June. He went back immediate after, even though threats against him had intensified, like this video posted on Instagram putting him in the cross hairs of a sniper rifle. He was continuing his opposition work when just last month --

Yevgenia: All of a sudden he begins experiencing this very elevated heart rate, his blood pressure drops very low. He begins sweating and he has trouble breathing.

His wife thinks her husband was attacked the same way as before.

Yevgenia: The first time he had been dragged from one hospital to another to yet another where they were trying to establish the cause. This time he was taken directly to the hospital, to the same medical team that had treated him in 2015. And the moment they saw him, they knew what they were dealing with.

“Many, unfortunately, have died. I’m the fortunate one. I’m still here. I’m still talking to you. Many of my colleagues cannot do that.”
Lesley Stahl: And what do you think happened?

Yevgenia: The Russian doctors’ official diagnosis is an acute intoxication by an undetermined substance, which is poisoning.

This happened just as Washington was raising questions about President Trump’s relationship with Mr. Putin. So last month Vladimir Kara-Murza became an issue on the Senate floor.

McCain: Vladimir has once again paid the price for his gallantry and integrity.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle spoke out against the apparent poisoning, but the Trump administration has not. Remarkably, Kara-Murza survived again. Less than three weeks after he collapsed, he was flown to the U.S. And two weeks later we spoke to him, for a second time.

Lesley Stahl: So you look pretty good. How are you actually feeling?

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Well, you’re very kind. I don’t think I feel as good as I look.

He said he’s recovering faster because his doctors knew just what to do this time. The Kremlin has denied any involvement, and since no poison has been found yet, supporters of Putin question whether he was really poisoned at all.

Lesley Stahl: We’ve been told that we are very naive, naive journalists, gullible, and that this whole thing is concocted by the opposition to fool the American people into thinking that that regime would do such a thing.

Vladimir Kara-Murza: To those who say that this is a plot, I honestly, and I mean this sincerely, I wish they never have to experience what I’ve experienced twice in the last two years, when you’re trying to breathe and you cannot. When you feel your organs shutting down, giving up on you one after another. And when you feel the life coming out of your body in the next few hours, and you don’t remember anything for the next month. And then for the next year you’re trying to relearn how to walk, how to use cutlery, you know, how to talk to your kids again. I wish these people who tell you these things never have to experience this. I honestly, sincerely do.

Lesley Stahl: You were very, very sick and went back. Now, are you finished? Are you saying, “I’m not going back any”—

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Oh God no, of course not.

Lesley Stahl: You’re going to go back?

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Of course, I will absolutely go back to Russia. I am Russian, this is my country, and I believe in what I do, in what my colleagues do. There are many of us.

Lesley Stahl: But not many have almost died twice.

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Many, unfortunately, have died. I’m the fortunate one. I’m still here. I’m still talking to you. Many of my colleagues cannot do that.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/putin-criti ... still-here



FBI Silent On Lab Results In Kremlin Foe's Suspected Poisoning

October 26, 2018 10:15 GMT
Mike Eckel
Carl Schreck
Russian opposition activist Vladmir Kara-Murza (file photo)
WASHINGTON -- The FBI has refused to release laboratory results into the suspected poisoning of anti-Kremlin activist Vladimir Kara-Murza last year, frustrating his congressional supporters and deepening the mystery behind his illness.

Amid the official silence from the FBI, Kara-Murza, who has lobbied for U.S. sanctions against Russian officials, now says he is trying to use freedom-of-information laws to access his own test results.

Two U.S. labs -- one affiliated with the FBI -- have tested blood, hair, and tissue samples taken from Kara-Murza after he was hospitalized in Moscow in February 2017, the second time in two years that he was placed on life support with poisoning symptoms in the Russian capital. Two other labs -- in France and Israel -- have also conducted tests, but they were inconclusive.

Kara-Murza, a 37-year-old veteran of Russia’s liberal opposition, says he believes both incidents were deliberate, retaliatory poisonings for his political activism, including his lobbying for the U.S. Magnitsky Act, a 2012 law that introduced sanctions for Russians deemed by Washington to be rights abusers.

His Russian doctors diagnosed his illness last year as "toxicity from an unspecified substance."

Kara-Murza, a Russian citizen and legal U.S. resident, has built close ties with members of Congress. With the help of several U.S. senators and at least one U.S. representative who appealed to FBI Director Christopher Wray, samples were provided to the FBI lab following his hospitalization last year, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort.

In discussions with U.S. lawmakers and congressional staff members earlier this year, FBI officials indicated they would consider releasing some of the results of the tests, according to the people directly familiar with the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the situation publicly.

But for unclear reasons, the FBI later notified members of Congress it would not, these people said -- frustrating those who felt it deserved more urgency. One senator even suggested in a letter to the FBI that the substance that triggered Kara-Murza’s illness may be "classified" by the agency.

An excerpt from the Russian opposition activists' medical report from a Moscow hospital after he fell gravely ill in February 2017. The diagnosis states "toxicity from an unspecified substance."

​'Small, Imperfect Protection'

Kara-Murza told RFE/RL that he filed a U.S. Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FBI in July in an effort find out what the bureau has learned about his unexplained illness.

He said the FBI also possessed samples from his first suspected poisoning in 2015 and that he had requested "all documents, test results, and internal communications related to me from May 2015."

"Somebody has tried to kill me twice, in Russia, in the past 3 1/2 years," he told RFE/RL. "I just returned back to Russia. I know the risks there, and I think what we are doing is important. If there is anything to protect me, it is a clear and public determination of the causes of the [2015 and 2017] poisonings."

"Not for curiosity's sake, but it could serve as a small, imperfect protection," he added.

Kara-Murza provided RFE/RL with the tracking number of his FOIA request. The agency's website says "potential responsive information" for that case number had been identified and was awaiting assignment to a specialist "for further processing."

Kara-Murza, who resides with his family outside Washington, recently returned to the United States after his first trip to Russia since his hospitalization with poisoning symptoms there in February 2017. He had previously split his time between the United States and Russia.

Kara-Murza declined further comment on the laboratory tests or the involvement of the FBI in the matter, which the agency also declined to address.

"In keeping with our usual policy, the FBI cannot comment on whether or not we are conducting a particular investigation," a bureau spokesperson told RFE/RL.

Sophisticated Toxins

The efforts to access the FBI's conclusions regarding Kara-Murza's illness come amid growing concern about suspected poisonings and deaths involving Russian activists, businessmen, and, most famously, Russian double agent Sergei Skripal.

Skripal and his daughter Yulia were hospitalized after falling suddenly ill in March 2018 in Salisbury, England, and British authorities later determined they had been poisoned with a Soviet-era military grade nerve agent called Novichok.

U.K. investigators examine the site in Salisbury where Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found poisoned in March 2018. (file photo)


British authorities later accused two Russian military-intelligence officials of being behind responsible for the attack, which the Skripals survived. A British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died later after accidentally being exposed to a perfume bottle that contained Novichok, authorities say.

In September, Russian opposition activist and publisher Peter Verzilov fell suddenly ill in Moscow. German doctors who treated him said it was "highly plausible" that he was poisoned.

Both Verzilov and Kara-Murza say they believe they were poisoned with sophisticated toxins likely only accessible to Russian security services.

Russia has repeatedly denied accusations of its involvement in poisonings of Kremlin opponents, including that of former Russian security-services officer Aleksandr Litvinenko, who died in London in 2006 after exposure to the radioactive isotope polonium-210.

SEE ALSO: Name Your Poison: Exotic Toxins Fell Kremlin Foes
Kara-Murza's lawyer, Vadim Prokhorov, declined to comment on questions about the U.S. lab tests.

Prokhorov told RFE/RL that Russian investigators questioned Kara-Murza and his wife, Yevgenia, in April as part of a preliminary probe into his suspected poisonings. Because the couple was in the United States at the time, the questioning was conducted by Skype, Prokhorov said.

He added that authorities had yet to provide information on whether a criminal case had been opened.

"We will continue to look into this," Prokhorov said.
Prokhorov previously said he believes investigators renewed their probe as a formality due to the international reaction to the Skripal poisoning.

Kara-Murza fell ill on February 2, 2017, in Moscow and was hospitalized in an intensive-care unit. His wife said later that her husband had suffered kidney failure and was on life support after being placed in a medically-induced coma.

His family said his symptoms were almost identical to those of his near-fatal 2015 illness. An independent toxicology test by a French lab into that suspected poisoning was also inconclusive.

Kara-Murza has worked with former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky's nongovernmental organization, Open Russia, and was also a close associate of Boris Nemtsov, the former Russian deputy prime minister who later became an outspoken opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Nemtsov was gunned down not far from the Kremlin walls in February 2015, three months before Kara-Murza suffered his first near-fatal illness.

Immediately after his February 2017 illness, Yevgenia Kara-Murza said that samples of her husband's blood, hair, and fingernails had been sent to private laboratories in France and Israel.

'The Justice He Deserves'

One of Kara-Murza's most vocal proponents in Congress was Republican Senator John McCain, who gave a speech on the Senate floor just days after Kara-Murza fell ill last year. Kara-Murza was a pall-bearer at the funeral for McCain, who died on August 25, 2018.

In a September 22, 2017, letter to FBI Director Wray, inquiring about the status of the investigation, McCain complained about administrative delays, and he pressed Wray to make the investigation a priority.

Vladimir Kara-Murza
Vladimir Kara-Murza and the late Senator John McCain in March 2017.

McCain also wrote that he believed both illnesses were deliberate poisonings -- and were politically motivated.

"Vladimir...has clearly been the victim of Putin's brutal campaign to eliminate his opposition. Identifying who and how this was done will help Vladimir seek the justice he deserves and will provide a small form of protection against repeated attacks on his life and that of other dissidents," McCain wrote.

A spokesperson for McCain could not be immediately reached for comment.

In March 2018 letter to Wray, Republican Senator Roger Wicker wrote that Kara-Murza's wife had delivered "a sample of his hair, blood, and nails to your lab for further analysis on February 19, 2017."

"I respectfully request your assistance in this matter with official correspondence stating the conclusion of this analysis and your agency's recommendation for Mr. Kara-Murza's future travel," Wicker wrote, according to a copy of the letter obtained by RFE/RL.

"While the specific substance may remain classified, it is my hope you will be able to clearly articulate the nature of the poisoning and its genesis," he wrote.

Wicker's office has yet to receive a response.

Mike Eckel reported from Washington; Carl Schreck from Prague.
https://www.rferl.org/amp/fbi-silent-on ... ssion=true
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Re: Who Poisoned Alexander Litvinenko? Radioactive thallium

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Nov 11, 2018 9:02 am


Friend of Alexander Litvinenko sues Russian TV channels for libel

Alex Goldfarb has filed a complaint in federal court in Manhattan after broadcasts on RT and Channel One blamed him for the former Russian spy’s 2006 death in London

Jon Swaine
Last modified on Thu 6 Sep 2018 19.55 EDT

Alex Goldfarb has filed a complaint in federal court in Manhattan after broadcasts on RT and Channel One blamed him for the former Russian spy’s 2006 death in London

A close friend of Alexander Litvinenko sued two Russian state television channels on Thursday for airing false claims that he was behind the late dissident’s murder.

Alex Goldfarb said he was the victim of “malicious defamation” in broadcasts shown on RT and Channel One earlier this year that blamed him for the fatal 2006 poisoning of Litvinenko in London.

In a complaint filed to federal court in Manhattan, Goldfarb accused both channels of libel and intentional infliction of emotional distress. He requested unspecified damages.

The legal action was supported by Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, who previously added her name to demands for retractions from the state-controlled television stations for their broadcasts.

“It took me 10 years to get some closure when a British court named my husband’s murderers,” Marina Litvinenko said in a statement. “Now these false claims that he was killed by our close friend are broadcast to tens of millions of people. This adds insult to injury.”

Anna Belkina, a spokeswoman for RT, said: “We have received a letter from Mr Goldfarb’s representative, and we are in the process of reviewing it.” Representatives for Channel One did not respond to a request for comment.

Litvinenko, a former Russian intelligence officer, was murdered in 2006 with a radioactive cup of tea. A public inquiry held by British authorities a decade later ruled that his killers were Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun and that they were sent by Russia’s FSB spy agency – probably with the approval of President Vladimir Putin.

The Kremlin has mounted a campaign to discredit the official version of the killing with help from Litvinenko’s father, Walter, who once blamed Putin for his son’s death but changed his account after returning to Russia from an unhappy exile in 2012.

Goldfarb’s lawsuit cites three broadcasts on Channel One and two on RT in March and April, following the nerve agent attack on another Russian dissident in England, which the British government has since blamed on Russian military intelligence.

It highlights comments made by Walter Litvinenko on Channel One on 20 March, when the elder Litvinenko claimed Goldfarb was a CIA agent and that he had been told “Alex killed Alexander,” later adding: “Goldfarb. It was his work.”

Goldfarb, who also pointed to another Channel One show that repeated the false allegations 10 days later, said in his lawsuit that the channel acted maliciously by choosing to ignore the official judicial findings on Litvinenko’s killing.

One of the RT broadcasts, which aired on 1 April, featured similar remarks from Walter Litvinenko and falsely asserted that all materials from the British inquiry into the poisoning death had been classified and kept secret.

“I don’t know if I will ever collect any damages,” Goldfarb said in a statement. “But I saw my friend die a most horrible death. I cannot permit them lie about it with impunity. I must show them, myself and everyone else that their spell of evil can somehow, somewhere be checked. Many people support us.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ ... for-libels
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Re: Who Poisoned Alexander Litvinenko? Radioactive thallium

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Sep 29, 2019 6:38 am

On the stage, Alexander Litvinenko gets the justice he was denied in life
Luke Harding

A Very Expensive Poison, about the dissident’s murder, shows how Putin and the Russian state twisted the truth
Sat 7 Sep 2019 01.00 EDT

Lloyd Hutchinson, Tom Brooke and Michael Shaeffer in A Very Expensive Poison
A scene from A Very Expensive Poison, adapted by Lucy Prebble from Luke Harding’s book. Photograph: Marc Brenner
The character is called Mr President. He’s a fussy little man who walks briskly down a red carpet. The Russian national anthem is a clue, as are the golden Kremlin doors. Yes, it’s Vladimir Putin, making an appearance on a London stage in A Very Expensive Poison, Lucy Prebble’s reimagining of the story of the dissident Alexander Litvinenko’s murder by Russia’s FSB spy agency, based on my 2016 book.

Reece Shearsmith plays Mr President with dark charm. He addresses the audience directly. “Whenever you tell a story you tell a lie,” he begins. He offers an alternative version of Litvinenko’s ghoulish killing. Instead of being poisoned with radioactive tea, Litvinenko lives out a happy family life in a cottage with his cat Yuri, Putin says. On the banks of the Volga. In the background a dog barks. The scene is marvellously chilling. Mr President is compelling. He has the best lines, including a gag about the only “crime” being the cost of the theatre programme and the Old Vic makeshift loo arrangements, and we laugh with him. But does this make us complicit in his deeds? Mr President is everywhere and nowhere. He offers quips from the balcony. He appears at Litvinenko’s death bed, robed in a hazmat protection suit.

Once conman leaders magic away facts, you are left with spectacle
Prebble has written a play for our age. Her Mr President is an alluring populist who deftly uses humour to achieve his goals. He captures our post-modern moment in which unscrupulous off-stage politicians have realised – or perhaps rediscovered – that truth is for suckers. What matters is narrative. Tell a beguiling story, a fairytale even, with a neat slogan, and the voters will trust and reward you.

Once con man leaders magic away facts, you are left with spectacle. My favourite scene in Prebble’s hugely enjoyable production comes when two British representatives – a detective and a lawyer – come to arrest Litvinenko’s killers. What happens next is a piece of messy meta-genius. We see a trail of luminous polonium handprints, a dance routine in which the murderers flee, shuffling off stage right, and a poignant last waltz.

In 1998 the actual Litvinenko, an intelligence officer, met Putin, his new boss. Litvinenko had denounced his own FSB agency and accused its leadership of corruption and crimes. His reward was suspension, threats, arrest. He escaped to Britain. In exile, he believed himself safe, a British citizen. He worked for his old patron Boris Berezovsky – a beguiling figure, in Prebble’s version, who bursts into oligarch song.

On stage, Putin appears in the Litvinenkos’ flat, alone. He picks up an ashtray from the table and casually repositions it on the floor. It’s a small and sinister gesture. Prebble’s message: we, the audience, need to pay attention. Details matter, especially in dark times like ours.

I had my own ashtray moment. I arrived in Moscow soon after Litvinenko’s murder in November 2006 and flew on one of the planes used to transport polonium. Was the Russian state behind his death? My question led to a break-in and other intrusions. On one occasion, FSB ghosts opened the window next to our small son’s bed. We lived on the 10th floor. The message seemed to be saying: take care, or your kid might tumble out.

Putin began by embracing the west. Now, he wants revenge
Angus Roxburgh
Read more
Putin refused to extradite the murderers – Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun. Lugovoi became a deputy in the state Duma. He even won a medal.

The play uses evidence revealed in 2015 at a public inquiry.The hitmen were idiot villains, it emerged. They took three attempts to get their victim and visited an erotic nightclub – a Soho scene wonderfully reimagined by Prebble, with glitter ball and golden phallus. The actual killers may be far away, but A Very Expensive Poison suggests that art can be its own form of justice. The judge who presided over the public inquiry, Sir Robert Owen, concluded that Putin had “probably” approved the assassination. Owen’s words and Litvinenko’s death-bed testimony appear in the play’s moving closing section. As do the words of Theresa May, who as home secretary, at first refused an inquiry.

The Litvinenko story is many things: a horror story from the cold war transplanted to 21st-century London, a parable of Russia’s dark return to authoritarianism, a tale of Jacobean revenge, gruesomely done. It is also a human drama. It is about love and loss. At its centre is Marina Litvinenko – a woman trying to navigate her way to the truth, across a treacherous sea of lies and temporising.

A Very Expensive Poison, adapted by Lucy Prebble from Luke Harding’s book, is at the Old Vic until 5 October
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ive-poison


A Very Expensive Poison review – Lucy Prebble's Litvinenko drama fascinates
4 / 5 stars 4 out of 5 stars.
Old Vic, London
The twisted tale of the Russian dissident’s death by radioactive poisoning employs songs, puppets and even Putin as an unreliable narrator
Michael Billington
@billicritic
Fri 6 Sep 2019 04.47 EDT Last modified on Fri 6 Sep 2019 18.25 EDT


Shadow play … Tom Brooke, left, as Alexander Litvinenko with Peter Polycarpou as Boris Berezovsky. Photograph: Marc Brenner
Watching Lucy Prebble’s fascinating new play about the murder of Alexander Litvinenko on British soil, I was frequently reminded of her earlier hit, Enron. Prebble once again bases her play on fact, tells a complex story with great clarity and adopts a variety of techniques, including direct address, puppetry and song, to create a uniquely theatrical spectacle.

Prebble openly acknowledges her debt to Guardian journalist Luke Harding’s book of the same name which exposed the astonishing details of the Litvinenko case but she goes her own way about recounting the story. The first half, largely seen through the eyes of Litvinenko’s wife, Marina, reminds us how this former detective with Russia’s FSB (successor to the KGB) died in a London hospital in 2006 of a radioactive element known as polonium-210. His offence was to have exposed the links between organised crime and the Russian government that forced himself and his wife to flee to Britain. Having meticulously explained the background, Prebble then allows Litvinenko’s former boss Vladimir Putin to become the unreliable narrator while showing how two Kremlin hitmen were despatched to London to carry out the killing.

What is impressive about the play is its kaleidoscopic variety of tone. In part, it is the love story of the Litvinenkos, capturing their closeness, Marina’s occasional criticism of her husband’s dubious anti-Putin tactics in exile and her determination that the truth about his death should be told despite the evasiveness of the British government when Theresa May was home secretary. But Prebble is unafraid to show the black comedy behind a tragic story. The hitmen turn out to be hapless bumblers, one of them even mislaying the fountain pen that contains the poison. Even Putin, who seeks to control the narrative from the vantage point of a stage-box, becomes a smarmy puppetmaster concealing his menace under a mask of ingratiation.

If the tone is constantly shifting, so, too, is the style of John Crowley’s exemplary production. Tom Scutt’s design is a box that contains multiple locations including a London hospital, a Moscow flat, the swish hotel where the poison was fatally administered. But, as with Enron, it’s the theatricality of the piece that constantly surprises: the history of polonium is told through a shadow-play fairytale and the Russian entrepreneur Boris Bereszovsky bursts into song while dining in a swanky Mayfair restaurant.


The play offers a compelling portrait of Russian corruption and British vacillation – it took nearly a decade for a public inquiry to be launched – and its multifaceted approach is anchored by strong central performances. MyAnna Buring’s Marina emerges as a woman of implacable determination and ferocious loyalty who shares her husband’s obsession with truth. Tom Brooke captures the complexity of Litvinenko, whose moral zeal is accompanied by a desire to protect his family. There is also a gallery of fine supporting performances from Reece Shearsmith as the deviously dangerous Putin, Lloyd Hutchinson and Michael Shaeffer as the barely competent assassins, Peter Polycarpou as the glad-handing Bereszovsky and Thomas Arnold as Marina’s staunch legal ally. It’s an evening that instructs as it entertains and that leaves one appalled at Britain’s initial reluctance to do anything that might antagonise Moscow.

• At the Old Vic, London, until 5 October.
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/ ... litvinenko


A Murdered Spy’s Widow Relives Her Loss Onstage
Published Sept. 4, 2019
She decided to tell the complex story of Mr. Litvinenko’s life and murder by having the character investigate his own death, with Mr. Putin trying to direct the action, or at least divert the audience’s attention from the truth, from the sidelines.

Ms. Prebble said she was also drawn to the love story behind the news event.

“I was touched by the immense loss to Marina,” she said. “She was not just dealing with a bereavement, which is terrible enough already, she was dealing with it being a murder, and then she’s dealing with the political machinations of it.”

After the murder, Ms. Litvinenko fought for years for an inquest, then a public inquiry, into her husband’s death, despite successive British governments blocking her efforts. She was as driven in her fight to expose Russian wrongdoing as her husband had been, Ms. Prebble said. “I thought what Marina did was tremendously moving,” she said. “She sort of carried on his fight.”
The writer met Ms. Litvinenko several times while researching the play, she said. The first was in a basement cafe of the London bookshop where Mr. Litvinenko used to meet his handler from the British secret service. Ms. Prebble worried that she might lose her sense of professional distance, she said, but that doesn’t seem to have happened: In the play, Mr. Litvinenko is sometimes portrayed as overly proud, or dangerously obsessed.

The play, Ms. Prebble said, has several messages: about Russian politics, about how governments in the West overlook murders like Mr. Litvinenko’s for economic or political reasons, and about male pride. But the main one, she said, is that a family suffered, and that no matter how absurd these events seem, they’re personal.

“After I met Marina a number of times, I did feel a personal connection to her,” Ms. Prebble said. “I wanted to do justice to how she spoke about Sasha.”

Last Friday at the Old Vic, Ms. Litvinenko eventually sat down to watch her life with Alexander onstage — both the happy times and the tragic ones.

Ms. Litvinenko said she was amazed by the actor MyAnna Buring’s portrayal of her. “MyAnna took everything from me: how she moved, how she talked, how she looked,” she said.
http://archive.is/rjfW8
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Re: Who Poisoned Alexander Litvinenko? Radioactive thallium

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 28, 2019 4:43 pm

Vladimir Bukovsky obituary
Luke HardingMon 28 Oct 2019 07.07 EDT
Dissident who exposed the Soviet use of psychiatry against political prisoners

Vladimir Bukovsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1976 and made his home in Cambridge.
Vladimir Bukovsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1976 and made his home in Cambridge. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian
Vladimir Bukovsky, who has died aged 76, was a Soviet dissident, Vladimir Putin critic, and human rights campaigner. He exposed the Soviet use of psychiatry against political prisoners and thus played a key role in undermining communism in eastern Europe.

Bukovsky was always modest about his achievements. He once said that it was the stupidity of those who ruled the Soviet Union that brought about its downfall. And yet together with a small group of fellow dissenters – he put their numbers at between 3,000 and 5,000 – in the 1960s and 1970s Bukovsky managed to chip away at Soviet power. He spent 12 years in a succession of prisons, labour camps and psychiatric hospitals. The KGB was his sworn enemy. They hated him and he hated them. Eventually, in 1976, they threw him out of the country.

Bukovsky likened his struggle against the Kremlin to that of a Siberian bear who repeatedly climbs a tree to get to a piece of carrion. In the way is a large, heavy block of wood. The bear swats the wood aside and is bashed on the side of the head. Enraged, he hits the wood harder, with a more painful result. Eventually the bear falls unconscious from the tree. “This is an approximate description of my relations with the powers that be,” he wrote.

Still, sometimes the bear won. It was Yuri Andropov – the KGB boss and future head of the politburo – who drew up a secret plan to use psychiatric facilities to “treat” dissidents. It was based on Nikita Khrushchev’s belief that anti-Soviet consciousness was a mental disease. Political opponents including Bukovsky were detained without trial. There was no appeal. They were injected with psychotropic drugs.

Vladimir Bukovsky showing his Soviet passport on arrival at Heathrow Airport, 1977.
Vladimir Bukovsky showing his Soviet passport on arrival at Heathrow Airport, 1977. Photograph: Ken Saunders/The Guardian
It was Bukovsky who brought this abhorrent practice to the attention of the west. The campaign to end it became a demand from human rights groups during the cold war. The Soviet Union eventually dropped this state policy. Bukovsky unmasked the role played by doctors and Soviet medicine, and delegitimised those at the top who gave them orders.

Bukovsky later transferred his antagonism to other Soviet and Russian leaders, in particular to Putin, of whom he said, “I think he’s evil.” He was pessimistic about Russia’s future. The KGB was still in charge of a country which, he predicted, was destined to implode. But he took pride in the post-communist liberation of eastern Europe. Of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary he told me: “There we achieved something.”

Bukovsky described his stubborn character as something given by nature. He was born in the Urals, in the autonomous republic of Bashkiria (now known as Bashkortostan). His parents, Konstantin and Nina, both journalists, had fled the German advance and returned to Moscow after the war finished. Bukovsky grew up in an overcrowded communal flat where his grandmother read him stories: Alexander Pushkin, Nikolay Nekrasov, the Brothers Grimm.

His rebellion began early. At the age of 10, in March 1953, Bukovsky watched from the rooftop of the National hotel in Moscow as crowds pushed and surged to see the body of Stalin lying in state. At school Bukovsky had been taught that Stalin was a god. And yet the god was dead. This was a contradiction. Bukovsky’s conclusion: he should think for himself and mistrust all authority.

His adolescence coincided with a turbulent period in Soviet politics. In 1956, when Bukovsky was 14, Khrushchev admitted before the 20th party congress that Stalin had killed millions of people. Another turning point came the same year when Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising. Bukovsky was in total sympathy with his Hungarian peers fighting on the streets. “We wanted the same thing in Russia,” he told me.

His first act of defiance was to start a school literary magazine. In 1960 he and two friends began poetry readings, previously forbidden, in front of a statue of Vladimir Mayakovsky. These gatherings became popular; the KGB, Bukovsky noted wryly, were forced to read Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam and Nikolay Gumilyov. Bukovsky was summoned for questioning. His parents, orthodox party members, were dismayed. Moscow University chucked him out.

Then, in 1961, the KGB arrested Bukovsky for the first time. It was the beginning of a long odyssey through the Soviet punishment system. He was in pre-detention at Lefortovo prison and was then carted off to Moscow’s notorious Serbsky institute for a psychiatric evaluation. Inside, Bukovsky discovered other political prisoners. Doctors told him his conflict with society meant he was crazy, a paranoiac. He politely demurred.

Bukovsky was an exemplary detainee. He read Dickens in English, charmed the elderly lieutenant colonel in charge, and became an expert on Soviet law. He was eventually let go. In 1965, however, the KGB arrested him again after a protest in Pushkin Square. A trial and more labour camps followed. He was shipped to Leningrad, Vladimir and Perm; his reputation as an incorrigible state enemy grew.

Vladimir Bukovsky in exile in 1977.
Vladimir Bukovsky in exile in 1977. Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer
Bukovsky learned how to manipulate the system, and taught others to do the same. He went on hunger strike 20 times. Sometimes this worked: in one camp the entire prison, including career criminals, joined him in an attempt to improve medical treatment. Mostly it did not. In Lefortovo, after 12 days, warders force-fed him through the nose, an intensely painful experience. He filed letters of complaint.

His autobiography, published in English in 1978 as To Build a Castle and in Russian under the title And the Wind Returns, gives a vivid portrait of life in Soviet jail. He wrote: “Strange things happened to time. On the one hand it seemed to pass with preternatural speed, beggaring belief. The entire daily routine with its ordinary, monotonously repetitive events – reveille, breakfast, exercise, dinner, supper, lights out, reveille, breakfast – fused into a sort of yellowish-brown blur, leaving nothing for the mind to cling to.

“On the other hand the same time could crawl with agonising slowness: it would seem as if a whole year had gone by, but no, it was still the same old month, and no end was in sight.”

By 1976 prison governors had grown terrified of Bukovsky. His mere presence, they believed, would cause other inmates to mutiny. The politburo decided to expel him to Switzerland, dumping him on a plane. Bukovsky settled in Cambridge. His home, a crumbling suburban property on the outskirts of town in Gilbert Road, became a site of pilgrimage for fans and for others who had fallen out with Kremlin power.

Vladimir Bukovsky attending a meeting at the Sakharov Centre in 2007 in Moscow shortly after announcing his intention to run for the presidency.
Vladimir Bukovsky attending a meeting at the Sakharov Centre in 2007 in Moscow shortly after announcing his intention to run for the presidency. Photograph: Laski Diffusion/Getty Images
In exile, Bukovsky completed his studies in neurophysiology, wrote his memoir and continued his campaign against the Soviet Union. He became an informal adviser to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Thatcher appreciated his frankness; she consulted him before her first meeting with the politburo’s new chief, Mikhail Gorbachev.

The early cold war debate in the west was whether to be friends with Moscow, or to have a nuclear war. According to Bukovsky, both Thatcher and Reagan told him that thanks to the small-scale dissident movement they realised the Soviet Union could be defeated without a shot being fired, by moral confrontation.

Bukovsky was grateful to Britain for giving him a home. He was a vehement opponent of the European Union, seeing in it a form of totalitarianism familiar from his long anti-Soviet struggle. A heavy smoker – a packet of Dunhill cigarettes was never far away – he believed that the UK was being slowly Sovietised, with needless laws, smoking bans and restrictions on individual liberty.

When Putin became president, Bukovsky was quick to realise what this meant for Russia: the KGB was back. He supported Russia’s fissiparous democratic opposition, which found itself slowly and ruthlessly strangled. In 2007, he tried to stand as a presidential candidate against Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s seat-warming successor. The Kremlin disqualified him.

Bukovsky became a mentor to Alexander Litvinenko, an officer of the FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service, who escaped to the UK in 2000. Bukovsky recalled walking with Litvinenko in Cambridge, on a sunny morning in 2003. Litvinenko got a chilling call from Moscow. It was a former FSB colleague. The colleague said: “You think you are safe in London. Come off it! Remember Trotsky!”

Litvinenko was poisoned in 2006 with radioactive polonium. Bukovsky gave evidence at a 2015 public inquiry into Litvinenko’s exotic murder, saying he was “pretty sure” Putin was to blame. The inquiry chairman, Sir Robert Owen, agreed, concluding in his report that the Russian president and his spy chief had “probably approved” the operation.

Soon before the inquiry began Cambridgeshire police raided Bukovsky’s home. They found images of child porn on his laptop. He strenuously protested his innocence. In April and May 2016 he went on hunger strike again, this time for 26 days. He demanded that the high court hear his libel action against the Crown Prosecution Service before he was put on trial.

Alert, smoking a cigarette, and speaking in impeccable English, Bukovsky said that hunger sharpened your mental faculties. “You slip into some kind of euphoria. You are flying all over the world. It’s incredible,” he told me.

His libel claim was dismissed in 2016, and it was decided in 2018 that proceedings against him should be indefinitely postponed because of his ill-health.

He is survived by a sister, Olga.

• Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky, neurophysiologist and dissident, born 30 December 1942; died 27 October 2019

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ ... y-obituary
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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