Replies

So. British law is now reduced to ‘probably?’

He made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Here's some background on the case...

Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB [Power]
Alexander Litvinenko & Yuri Felshtinsky

This book, co-authored by Alexander Litvinenko, the victim of the notorious 2006 London polonium poisoning, attempts to demonstrate that modern Russia's most fundamental problems do not result from the radical reforms of the liberal period of Yeltsin's terms as president, but from the open or clandestine resistance offered to these reforms by the Russian special services. It was they who unleashed the first and second Chechen wars, in order to divert Russia away from the path of democracy and towards dictatorship, militarism, and chauvinism.

The authors alleged that the Russian apartment bombings and other September 1999 terrorist acts were committed by the Federal Security Service. Litvinenko and Felshtinsky wrote that the bombings were a false flag operation intended to justify Second Chechen War and bring Vladimir Putin to power.

Originally published in 2002
(223 pages)

http://www.libertypublishinghouse.com/Blowing_up_Russia_E.aspx

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Putin's Poison?
by Peter Brookes, November 27, 2006

The death of former Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, last week from radioactive Polonium-210 poisoning is the latest in a series of politically motivated attacks on the outspoken opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed112706a.cfm
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"Over the next six years, Litvinenko became an anti-Kremlin journalist, accusing the Russian government of abuses during their battles with Chechen separatists in the 1990s, and the FSB's alleged 1999 bombing of 300 people in explosions at apartments in Russia that was used to justify its second war against Chechnya.

He also claimed two of the Chechen separatists who took hostages at a theater in Moscow in October 2002 during which 162 people died were working for the FSB. He also pointed the finger at the FSB for having trained al Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri."

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/237045/long-awaited-investigation-alexander-v-litvinenkos-arnold-ahlert

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Litvinenko: A deadly trail of polonium [poisoned by Putin?...case now concluding]
BBC - Magazine ^ | July 28, 2015

"The polonium trail started on 16 October 2006 when Litvinenko met Lugovoi and Kovtun in London. ..."

"When Lugovoi and Kovtun's movements were mapped against the sites of polonium contamination, there was an exact match. The evidence of guilt was strong. In May 2007, the then Director of Public Prosecutions Ken Macdonald announced that Andrei Lugovoi was to be charged with murder and his extradition would be sought from Russia. Kovtun was charged in 2010. ..."

Prof Norman Dombey, a physicist who has a deep knowledge of Russian nuclear sites, gave evidence at the public inquiry.

Dombey says there is only one place where it can be produced in the quantities used in the murder - a military nuclear reactor at the Avangard plant in the closed city of Sarov. Sarov was where Russia produced its first nuclear bomb in the days of Joseph Stalin. This is a clear link to the Russian state.

But why would the Russian state want him dead? ..."

It is clear that Alexander Litvinenko had powerful enemies in Russia. ..."

The first red line concerns a book he co-wrote called Blowing Up Russia about a terrorist attack in Moscow in September 1999. Chechen separatists were blamed.

"Litvinenko claimed that Russia's own security services carried out the attack to give Putin the cover to launch a new Chechen war. Some 300 people had died. ..."

His co-author, Felshtinsky, stands by their conclusions and says: "This [attack] helped Putin...the reaction of the population was we now have to have a strong leader. ..."

The inquiry will now hear secret evidence from intelligence agencies in special closed sessions. It will report back at the end of the year and, until then, the mystery will rumble on."

(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...

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BBC, 27 July 2015

Litvinenko inquiry: Key suspect 'cannot testify'

"UK officials believe Dmitry Kovtun and another man, Andrei Lugovoi, poisoned Mr Litvinenko in 2006, which they deny.

Mr Kovtun had been due to appear by videolink from Moscow on Monday, but said he had been unable to get permission from Russian authorities.

Mr Litvinenko's family lawyer said it seemed the case was being manipulated."

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33674469

Someone wants a battle with Russia that we don’t need.

"GUILTY! Well, probably..."

"Putin said Stalin deserves statues in his honor"

http://en.ria.ru/russia/20131219/185734707/Putin-Says-Stalin-No-Worse-Than-Cunning-Oliver-Cromwell.html
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"the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century" -Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the collapse of the Soviet Union...

"World democratic opinion has yet to realize the alarming implications of President Vladimir Putin's State of the Union speech on April 25, 2005, in which he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.'..."

"The more I see and read about Mr. Putin, in power since 1999, and his 'managed democracy,' the more apprehensive I become about the future of Russia and the safety of its neighbors.

If Putin believes that the dissolution of the Soviet Union into 15 independent states represents the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,' then it follows that Putin might well believe he should do something to repair the loss..."

http://web.archive.org/web/20090415000000*/http://www.hooverdigest.org/053/beichman.html
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"The demise of the Soviet Union was the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century'," Putin said in 2005.

http://www.thetrumpet.com/article/11102.30640.0.0/asia/moscow-puts-the-soviet-squeeze-on-neighbor-nations
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"'The Black Book of Communism,'; a scholarly accounting of communism's crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say that number is too low."

Forgetting the Evils of Communism: The amnesia bites a little deeper
By Jonah Goldberg, August 2008:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100711090651/http://article.nationalreview.com/365528/forgetting-the-evils-of-communism/jonah-goldberg
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"The demise of the Soviet Union was the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century'," Putin said in 2005.

"Putin said Stalin deserves statues in his honor"

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Putin, once critical of Stalin, now embraces Soviet dictator's tactics

Carol J. Williams, reporting from Moscow
June 11, 2015

Only six years ago, President Vladimir Putin visited the Polish port of Gdansk, birthplace of the Solidarity movement that threw off Soviet domination, and reassured his Eastern European neighbors that Russia had only friendly intentions.

Putin spoke harshly that day of the notorious World War II-era pact that former Soviet leader Josef Stalin had signed with Adolf Hitler -- an agreement that cleared the way for the Nazi occupation of Poland and Soviet domination of the Baltics -- calling it a "collusion to solve one's problems at others' expense."

But Putin's view of history appears to have undergone a startling transformation. Last month, the Russian leader praised the 1939 nonaggression accord with Hitler as a clever maneuver that forestalled war with Germany. Stalin's 29-year reign, generally seen by Russians in recent years as a dark and bloody chapter in the nation's history, has lately been applauded by Putin and his supporters as the foundation on which the great Soviet superpower was built.

Across a resurgent Russia, Stalin lives again, at least in the minds and hearts of Russian nationalists who see Putin as heir to the former dictator's model of iron-fisted rule.

Recent tributes celebrate Stalin's military command acumen and geopolitical prowess. His ruthless repression of enemies, real and imagined, has been brushed aside by today's Kremlin leader as the cost to be paid for defeating the Nazis.

As Putin has sought to recover territory lost in the 1991 Soviet breakup, his Stalinesque claim to a right to a "sphere of influence" has allowed him to legitimize the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine and declare an obligation to defend Russians and Russian speakers beyond his nation's borders.

On May 9, the 70th anniversary of the Allied war victory was marked and Stalin's image was put on display with glorifying war films, T-shirts, billboards and posters. Framed portraits of the mustachioed generalissimo were carried by marchers in Red Square's Victory Day parade and in the million-strong civic procession that followed to honor all who fell in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War.

Putin's embrace of Stalin's power-play tactics is applauded by many Russians and other former Soviet citizens as the sort of decisive leadership they longed for while watching communism collapse around them. To the proponents of a reinvigorated Russia, reformist Mikhail Gorbachev and his successor, Boris Yeltsin, are seen as having submitted Russia to Western domination.

Over the last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin has presented dictator Josef Stalin's bloody 29-year reign as the foundation on which the Soviet superpower was built.

Stalin lives again, at least in minds and hearts.

Stalin "kept us all together, there was a friendship of nations, and without him everything fell apart," said Suliko Megrelidze, a 79-year-old native of Stalin's Georgian birthplace who sells dried fruit and spices at a farmers market. "We need someone like him if we want peace and freedom from those fascists in Europe and America."

Such sentiments are no longer confined to those with actual memories of the Stalin era. A poll this spring by the independent Levada Center found 39% of respondents had a positive opinion of Stalin. As to the millions killed, 45% of those surveyed agreed that the deaths could be justified for the greater accomplishments of winning the war, building modern industries and growing to eventually give their U.S. nemesis a battle for supremacy in the arms race and conquering outer space.

The share of Russians who look back approvingly has been increasing steadily in recent years, and the segment of those who tell pollsters they have no opinion on his place in their history has shot up even more sharply, said Denis Volkov, a sociologist with the Levada Center.

He points to this year's massive Victory Day events as the Kremlin's message to ungrateful neighbors that they owe their peace and prosperity to the wartime deaths of more than 20 million Soviet citizens.

"The figure of Stalin is being justified through the war," Volkov said. "There is an attitude now that, yes, there were repressions and, yes, there were huge losses, but we won the war after all."

Victory exonerated Stalin's excesses, just as it does Putin's "strongman" posture toward neighbors and former Soviet subjects now outside the Russian Federation's borders, Volkov said.

Stalin's standing among his countrymen has waxed and waned with the political upheavals that have wracked the Soviet Union and Russia. He was so dominant a figure in Soviet citizens' lives by the time of his death on March 5, 1953, that hundreds of thousands poured into the streets of Moscow in a chaotic outbreak of mourning when word of his passing reached a public taught to believe that life was impossible without Stalin -- the Bolshevik nom de guerre he adopted, signifying "man of steel."

Nikita Khrushchev, who finally prevailed in attaining the leadership after five years of Kremlin infighting, began a campaign of de-Stalinization in 1961, moving Stalin's embalmed remains from public display next to Vladimir Lenin's to a less prominent grave near the Kremlin wall. Stalingrad, the hero city that symbolized the Soviets' watershed battle to turn back the Nazis, was renamed Volgograd, and statues and busts were removed, and streets, institutes and schools were renamed.

But the erasure of Stalin's name and likeness served also to stifle discussion of his vast crimes: Siberian exile or death sentences for political opponents, collectivization of agriculture during which millions starved, deportation of minorities and property seizures that impoverished generations. It wasn't until Gorbachev came to power in 1985 that a candid recounting of his era was attempted.

Even Putin, earlier in his presidency, fell in line with the collective spirit of criticism of Stalinâ€™s errors. During the visit to Poland in 2009, a year after he had sent troops to seize territory in sovereign Georgia, Putin appeared to reassure Russia's nervous neighbors that the nonaggression pact that paved the way for war and division 70 years earlier was to be remembered as immoral.

The Aug. 23, 1939, Molotov-Ribbentrop pact's secret protocols doomed Poland to Nazi occupation a week later and gave the Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania to the Soviet Union. Millions of citizens of those betrayed territories died at Stalin's hand, in political purges, summary executions and slave labor camps.

The scope of Stalin's brutality remains a topic of heated debate. Late Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn once claimed in an interview that as many as 110 million died from the dictator's vast array of repressions between 1921 and 1959, including prisoners who succumbed long after Stalin's reign. Historian Viktor Zemkov, at the other extreme, puts the number of deaths attributable to Stalin at 1.4 million.

"The estimates of 110 million to 1.4 million speak for themselves -- a hundredfold disagreement," said Dmitry Lyskov, a state television talk-show host who mounted a failed campaign four years ago to put Stalin's visage on city buses to commemorate Victory Day.

The Russian Military-Historical Society, established by Putin in 2012, announced this year that a new Stalin museum was to open in May in the village of Khoroshevo, 140 miles northeast of Moscow. Stalin spent the night of Aug. 4, 1943, in a small wooden home there, the closest he came to visiting frontline Soviet troops during the four-year fight to defeat Germany.

The sanitized exhibits recounting Stalin's contributions to the war effort and postwar recovery were ready by the planned May 9 holiday. But the opening was postponed amid local opposition led by the Tver regional leader of Memorial, a group dedicated to shedding light on Russia's totalitarian era.

Yan Rachinsky, a leader of Memorial's Moscow chapter, calls the museum "ridiculous," and Stalin's single night there irrelevant to the war victory two years later.

The stillborn museum was one of several official efforts to honor Stalin this year: A statue was erected in the southern city of Lipetsk, and splashed with red paint the night it was unveiled. A bronze likeness of the dictator was put up to mark the February anniversary of his 1945 meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Yalta, a Black Sea resort now inaccessible to most of the world as only Russian aviation serves the contested Crimean peninsula.

Stalin has weathered more than six decades of historical revisions to maintain his standing as a rival to the West, "which is the context in which he interests Putin," said Nikolai Svanidze, a writer and historian whose grandfathers died in Stalinâ€™s political purges.

"Just as Stalin defeated the West 70 years ago by capturing half of Europe," Svanidze said, "we are defeating the West again today. Crimea is our Berlin, our Reichstag, and there is no way it will be restored to Ukraine in the foreseeable future."

Svanidze also predicts there will be no more credible elections as long as Putin chooses to stay in power. That, he said, is another parallel with Stalin's lifetime sinecure as Soviet leader.

http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-russia-stalin-model-20150611-story.html

From a 2007 article titled "Putin's Russia"...

"KGB influence 'soars under Putin,' " blared the headline of a BBC online article for December 13, 2006. The following day, a similar headline echoed a similarly alarming story at the website of Der Spiegel, one of Germany's largest news magazines: "Putin's Russia: Kremlin Riddled with Former KGB Agents."

In the opening sentences of Der Spiegel's article, readers are informed that: "Four out of five members of Russia's political and business elite have a KGB past, according to a new study by the prestigious [Russian] Academy of Sciences. The influence of ex-Soviet spies has ballooned under President Vladimir Putin."

The study, which looked at 1,061 top Kremlin, regional, and corporate jobs, found that "78 percent of the Russian elite" are what are known in Russia as "siloviki," which is to say, former members of the KGB or its domestic successor, the FSB. The author of the study, Olga Kryshtanovskaya, expressed shock at her own findings. "I was very shocked when I looked at the boards of major companies and realized there were lots of people who had completely unknown names, people who were not public but who were definitely, obvious siloviki," she told Reuters.

Other supposed experts - in Russia and the West - have also expressed surprise and alarm at the apparent resurrection of the dreaded Soviet secret police. After all, for the past decade and a half these same experts have been pointing to the alleged demise of the KGB as the primary evidence supporting their claim that communism is dead.

From the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Russian security apparatus Cheka (and its later permutations: OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB) had been the "sword and shield" of the communist world revolution.

"We stand for organized terror," declared Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first chief of the Cheka for Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin. In 1918, Dzerzhinsky launched the campaign of arrests and executions known as the Red Terror. Krasnaya Gazeta, the Bolshevik newspaper, expressed the Chekist credo when it reported approvingly in 1918 of the terror campaign: "We will make our hearts cruel, hard and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood."

Unflinching cruelty and merciless, bloody terror have been the trademark of the communist secret police, from the Cheka to the KGB. Obviously, the demise of such an organization would be cause for much rejoicing. Hence, when the KGB was ordered dissolved and its chairman, General Vladimir Kryuchkov, was arrested in 1991 after attempting to overthrow "liberal reformer" Mikhail Gorbachev in the failed "August Coup," many people in the West were only too willing to pop the champagne corks and start celebrating our supposed victory over the Evil Empire.

But, as Mikhail Leontiyev, commentator for Russia's state-controlled Channel One television, recently noted, repeating a phrase popular among the siloviki: "Americans got so drunk at the USSR's funeral that they're still hung over." And stumbling around in their post-inebriation haze, many of these Americans have only recently begun noticing that they had prematurely written the KGB's epitaph, even as it was arising vampire-like from the coffin.

However, there is really no excuse for Olga Kryshtanovskaya or any of her American counterparts to be stunned by the current siloviki dominance in Putin's Russia. For nearly a decade, even before he became Russia's "president," THE NEW AMERICAN has been reporting on Putin's KGB pedigree and his steady implementation of a long-range Soviet deception strategy, including the public rehabilitation and refortifying of the KGB-FSB. ..."

(continues at link)

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/8420-putins-russia

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"For 16 years Putin was an officer in the KGB, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before he retired to enter politics in his native Saint Petersburg in 1991.

He moved to Moscow in 1996 and joined President Boris Yeltsin's administration where he rose quickly, becoming Acting President on 31 December 1999 when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned. Putin won the subsequent 2000 presidential election, despite widespread accusations of vote-rigging,[3] and was reelected in 2004."

"On 25 July 1998, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin head of the FSB (one of the successor agencies to the KGB), the position Putin occupied until August 1999. He became a permanent member of the Security Council of the Russian Federation on 1 October 1998 and its Secretary on 29 March 1999."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin

The truth is that Russian spies are fully aware that they become disloyal at the threat of death. In this case, there was a high level effort to assassinate a political opponent to Putin, and “oligarch” billionaire named Boris Berezovsky.

In Russian politics, political opposition alone is risky, but there may have been other, far more legitimate reasons to want Berezovsky killed.

Alexander Litvinenko, and several other KGB/FSB spies rejected the idea of assassination, so he fled to Britain. There is no mention of whatever happened to his peers, that could also be of moment. Because disobedience may be a whole other ball of wax than “defection”.

In any event, Berezovsky also fled to Britain, after being accused of serious fraud and embezzlement. The British High Court judged Berezovsky as an “inherently unreliable” witness, who “regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be moulded to suit his current purposes” and that “At times the evidence which he gave was deliberately dishonest; sometimes he was clearly making his evidence up as he went along in response to the perceived difficulty in answering the questions.”

In any event, nothing that happens in Russian politics, or espionage, is clear.

Here's another, more recent, "mysterious" death...

Mikhail Lesin, co-founder of the Russian government-controlled news outlet "Russia Today" (RT), which the FR Putinistas often link to in their threads, died mysteriously in a Wash DC hotel this past November (2015).

Word is he was about to become an informer, a 'snitch'. Putin's Russia is very much like the Mafia.

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Nov 2015...

Vladimir Putin's media Svengali who was found dead in DC hotel was 'murdered for being an FBI informant'

Millionaire Mikhail Lesin, 57, was found dead in $240-a-night in Washington DC last Friday [Nov 6, 2015] and police are investigating
The pro-Putin 'propaganda channel' he set up, RT [Russia Today], claimed he 'had been suffering from a prolonged unidentified illness'
But DC police have made no such finding
"Nicknamed the 'Bulldozer', Lesin was one of the key props of the Putin presidency, personally masterminding a wide-ranging media crackdown which has left the vast majority of Russian TV stations and newspapers obedient to the Kremlin."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3315994/Vladimir-Putin-s-media-mastermind-dead-DC-hotel-murdered-FBI-informant-alive-claim-Russians.html#ixzz3rOUopg7Q
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"RT [Russia Today] has been called a propaganda outlet for the Russian government[10][11][12] and its foreign policy[10][11][13][14] by former Russian officials[15] and by news reporters,[16] including former RT reporters.[17][18][19]
It has also been accused of spreading disinformation.[20][21][22]
The United Kingdom media regulator Ofcom has threatened RT with sanctions because of repeated violations of its rules on impartiality.[23]
The network states that it offers a 'Russian perspective' on global events.[24]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_%28TV_network%29
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The following article is from last December (2014)
"Mikhail Lesin has stepped down as head of major state-controlled media holding Gazprom-Media, the company said late last week.
Gazprom-Media, whose holdings include independent radio station Ekho Moskvy, said Lesin's resignation was due to family reasons, Russian media reports said Friday.
The holding's board of directors will finalize his resignation at an upcoming meeting, Gazprom-Media was cited by Ekho Moskvy as saying. No replacement has been named.
Earlier, a flurry of reports of Lesin's imminent resignation appeared on Russian news wires, all based on undisclosed sources and giving divergent accounts of the motive.
Forbes Russia cited sources in the media and government as confirming the resignation, with one of the individuals claiming that the decision was made personally by President Vladimir Putin."
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/513690.html

Tom Brady Probably Knew Footballs Were Doctored, N.F.L. Finds

Yet another...

Russia's Director of Military Intelligence Dies Unexpectedly
The Wall Street Journal ^ | Jan. 4, 2016 | Paul Sonne

Since you need to subscribe or log-in to access the article at WSJ, here below is the same from another source...

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MOSCOW-The director of Russia's military intelligence agency has died unexpectedly, according to a short statement released Monday on the Kremlin website, which didn't specify the cause of his death.

Col. Gen. Igor Sergun had run the Main Intelligence Directorate of Russia's General Staff, known as the GRU, since late 2011. He was 58 years old.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, in a statement released to the Interfax news agency, said Col. Gen. Sergun died suddenly on Sunday. Mr. Shoigu's statement offered no additional details.

The military intelligence chief joined the Soviet military in 1973 and became director of the secretive GRU and deputy chief of Russia's general staff in 2011, according to his official biography on the Russian Defense Ministry website. He served in military intelligence since 1984, according to the biography.

Last year, the U.S. and European Union sanctioned Col. Gen. Sergun after Russia annexed Crimea and backed a rebel uprising in east Ukraine.

Western and Ukrainian officials have accused the GRU, one of the most important parts of Russia's foreign intelligence apparatus, of playing a sizable role in the conflict in Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin praised the military intelligence chief for dedicating his life to the motherland in a message to his friends and relatives that the Kremlin press service released to Russian newswires on Monday.

"His colleagues and subordinates knew him as a real military officer, and experienced and competent commander, a person of great courage and a true patriot," Mr. Putin said. "They respected him for his professionalism, strength of character, honesty and integrity."

http://www.advfn.com/news_Russias-Director-of-Military-Intelligence-Dies_69876453.html

Unbelievable, it’s taken so long to get a probable. T’would be easier to impeach Soetero or at least melt down his pen and a phone for a prison shiv..polonium tequila mix anyone?