Vladimir Putin was furious when one of his former spies, Alexander Litvinenko, publicly called him a pedophile in 2006 — a slur that likely spurred the Russian leader to order the dissident’s assassination in London four months later, a British report concluded on Thursday.
Litvinenko was fatally poisoned by a cup of green tea spiked with radioactive polonium-210.
Owen said the personal attacks were among the “powerful motives” for the assassination.
The bombshell accusations of state-sponsored revenge and murder were revealed in a comprehensive 329-page report prepared by retired High Court Judge Sir Robert Owen and released Thursday after a yearlong inquest.
Reaction to the report reverberated from London to Moscow.
Britain summoned the Russian ambassador for a dressing-down and imposed an asset freeze on the two main suspects: Andrei Lugovoi, now a Russian lawmaker, and Dmitry Kovtun.
The report would “further poison the atmosphere of our bilateral relations,” said the spokesman, Dmitry Peskov.
Litvinenko, who had lived under asylum in Britain since 2000, after defecting from the FSB — the KGB’s successor agency — had ignited Putin’s outrage by claiming on a Russian-language Web site that the spy agency once possessed videotapes showing Putin “making sex with some underage boys.”
The gadfly dissident also recounted in his article Putin’s creepy behavior in one incident in 2006. As news cameras rolled in a tourist-crammed public square near the Kremlin, Putin lifted the shirt of a little boy and kissed him on the bare belly, explaining later, “I wanted to cuddle him like a kitten, and it came out in this gesture.”
“Nobody can understand why the Russian president did such a strange thing as kissing the stomach of an unfamiliar small boy,” Litvinenko noted in the article.
This insinuation may well have helped spell Litvinenko’s doom, Owen’s report says.
“It hardly needs saying that the allegations made by Mr. Litvinenko against President Putin in this article were of the most serious nature,” he writes.
“Could they have had any connection with his death?”
Owen then answers his own question, asserting that Putin “probably” ordered the hit, and that it was carried out by operatives working for FSB at the behest of the spy agency’s then-head, Nikolai Patrushev.
“Taking full account of all the evidence and analysis available to me, I find that the FSB operation to kill Mr. Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr. Patrushev and also by President Putin,” the report says.
“There was undoubtedly a personal dimension to the antagonism” between Putin and Litvinenko, the report says.
There’s no question, the report asserts, that Litvinenko was murdered by a dose of radioactive polonium that was dropped into his tea by two Russian operatives.
Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, childhood friends who had served together in the KGB, had sat down for tea with him in November 2006 at a posh London hotel and were linked to the murder by incriminating statements and trace evidence of the radioactive isotope.
There was a “strong probability” that Lugovoi and Kovtun were working for Putin, since they had no personal grudge against Litvinenko and possessed reactor-grade polonium that could be obtained only by a government source — and likely from a Russian nuclear plant, the report says.
“The fact that Mr. Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium-210 that had been manufactured in a nuclear reactor suggests that Mr. Lugovoi and Mr. Kovtun were acting for a state body, rather than (say) a criminal organization,” it says.
There was strong evidence that the Russian secret service had used radioactive poisons in previous opponents of the Putin administration and had tested radioactivity as a weapon against humans, including in one case on a prisoner, the report said.
Putin had strong motives for getting rid of Litvinenko, Owen notes.
The dissident was a prolific Kremlin critic, accusing Putin in books and articles of rising to, and retaining, power through corruption, bloodshed and intimidation carried out by his secret services.
Lugovoi and Kovtun were charged with Litvinenko’s murder the following year by British prosecutors, who found traces of reactor-grade polonium on their bodies and possessions.
The two remain in Russia, which refuses to extradite them.