Why Russia uses poison to silence enemies like Alexei Navalny
Why Russia uses poison to silence enemies like Alexei Navalny
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In tsarist days, legend has it that Prince Yusupov fed cyanide to Rasputin in cakes and a glass of Madeira wine, hoping to kill him. When that failed, Rasputin was shot in the head. Today’s toxins are more terrifying — and their use by the state a powerful deterrent to Putin’s opponents.
Who can forget the haunting images of Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian defector and Putin critic, as he lay in bed suffering an agonising death in London in 2006 after drinking a cup of tea laced with radioactive polonium-210?
“It sends a very clear message: ‘If you screw with us terrible things will happen,’” says a security source. “The message is not only that the state can kill, but that it can do so without ever admitting it has done anything at all.”
Nor is poison the only method favoured for its ambiguity. In recent years a striking number of Russian officials, business figures and critics of the Kremlin have died after falling from windows or balconies — deaths routinely described as suicides. Like poisoning, defenestration offers deniability without subtlety: a violent end that leaves no obvious weapon, no clear perpetrator and just enough uncertainty to smother accountability.
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