Vladimir Putin so often poisons his critics – but is this conspiracy all it seems? MARK ALMOND analyzes whether Roman Abramovich pulled off an extraordinary double bluff…or someone in Russia is trying to sabotage hopes for peace in Ukraine
Russia’s dark war against Ukraine is becoming more menacing by the day. News of peace talks earlier this month had raised faint hopes of a ceasefire anytime soon.
But now it turns out that the mediators themselves; Roman Abramovich, another Russian businessman, and Ukrainian MP Rustem Umerov were poisoned during these talks.
Assuming this isn’t an extraordinary double-bluff on the part of Abramovich himself – who, after all, could do well to be perceived as Kremlin-detached – does this mean that someone in Russia is trying to sabotage hopes for peace?
Assuming this isn’t an extraordinary double bluff by Abramovich himself, does that mean someone in Russia is trying to sabotage hopes for peace?
It’s certainly possible – in the grim world of post-Soviet assassinations, the Kremlin’s intelligence agencies have a form as long as their reach.
It wouldn’t be the first time a Ukrainian politician has been the target of Russian poisoning.
Ukraine’s pro-Western presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko suffered a terrible disfigurement after ingesting dioxin – a chemical found in the herbicide Agent Orange – at dinner with the chief of Ukraine’s security service in 2004. He claims it was the work of the Kremlin.
And Britain, of course, has seen two confirmed cases of poisoning by Russian agents. Back in 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a defector who was granted asylum here, was poisoned with radioactive polonium and died an agonizing, slow death.
A dozen years later, Sergei Skripal, a Russian spy betrayed by MI6, was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok along with his daughter and three others in Salisbury.
In Russia, two years ago, leading Putin critic Alexei Navalny suffered the agonizing effects of a Novichok dose.
He survived but is being held in a strict-regime prison camp to see if his strictness will cure him of his anti-Putin stance.
It has been suggested that the chemicals used in the recent alleged attack on Abramovich could have been porphyrins, organophosphates or bicyclics – all toxic compounds.
However, experts believe that the dose allegedly used against the envoys was deliberately low. So it doesn’t seem like an attempted assassination, but rather an attempt to threaten ceasefire negotiators.
Whatever the motive, the finger of suspicion points to the man occupying Stalin’s office in the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin’s opponents, big and small, have a habit of suddenly coming down with strange symptoms. Stalin’s too. As early as the 1920s, Stalin used a team of secret police chemists in Red Square to create deadly potions for his rivals at home and abroad.
Just because the villains in the early Bond films belonged to SMERSH, you shouldn’t think this was an Ian Fleming pipe dream.
SMERSH, a portmanteau of the Russian phrase “death to traitors and spies,” was Stalin’s own murder society, and many of its veterans rose to high positions in the communist hierarchy.
Vladimir Putin’s own KGB service has not been quite as notable, but he has never hidden his admiration for his murderous “heroes,” the villains in Western Cold War history. It seems natural that President Putin would use some of Stalin’s darkest “special measures” to silence or intimidate his opponents.
It might seem odd to give Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich a nasty dose of something as he appeared to be acting as Moscow’s man in those talks. But the oligarch has enemies.
Vladimir Putin’s own KGB service has not been quite as notable, but he has never hidden his admiration for his murderous “heroes”.
Even if Putin himself hasn’t targeted him, hardliners in Russia’s intelligence community may want to undo any compromise he brokered.
The intelligence war is a world of mirrors, and the obvious suspect in the Kremlin may not be behind this strange episode.
But Russia’s record of political poisoning is hard to ignore, and a half-baked but cynical plan by Putin to destroy the peace in the same way is worryingly plausible. Who wants to deal with him next?
Mark Almond is Director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford