Free Republic

WASHINGTON — The U.S. State Department refused to comment on Russia's request to hand over Russian businessman Leonid Nevzlin, currently on international wanted list. State Department spokesman Tom Casey said the department has never commented on extradition requests, adding that there is no bilateral agreement on extradition between the United States and Russia. Casey said he had no information on whether Nevzlin is still in the United States. On Tuesday, Russia asked the United States to hand over the former top Yukos manager, who has reportedly been in the Unites States for a week. On Wednesday, Nevzlin asked the U.S....

Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned on the direct orders of the Kremlin because of his biting mockery of President Putin, according to a former Soviet spy now living in Britain. Oleg Gordievsky, the most senior KGB agent to defect to Britain, said that the attempt to kill Mr Litvinenko had been state-sponsored. It was carried out by a Russian friend and former colleague who had been recruited secretly in prison by the FSB, the successor to the KGB. The Italian who allegedly put poison in Mr Litvinenko’s sushi “had nothing to do with it”. “Of course it is state-sponsored. He...

TEL AVIV - Russian-Israeli oligarch Leonid Nevzlin announced on Tuesday that he planned to give up his Russian passport in protest of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "Everything that Putin touches dies," Nevzlin wrote in a Facebook post. "I am against the war. I am against the occupation. I am against the genocide of the Ukrainian people." Nevzlin was among the first prominent Russian oligarchs to establish self-imposed exile in Israel, fleeing what he has described as a campaign of politically-motivated persecution by Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2003, Nevzlin fled Russia for Israel amid a Kremlin-backed investigation into his Yukos...

MOSCOW, Dec 27 (Reuters) - Russian prosecutors said on Wednesday that Leonid Nevzlin, a former top manager of the YUKOS business empire, could have ordered the poisoning of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko. "A version is being looked at that those who ordered these crimes could be the same people who are on an international wanted list for serious and very serious crimes, one of whom is ... Leonid Nevzlin," Russia's prosecutor-general's office said in a statement posted on its Web site www.genproc.gov.ru. [...] A trusted business partner of jailed Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Nevzlin has provoked the Kremlin's...

Irina Khakamada is running for president but her campaign headquarters are not bustling. Phones aren't ringing off the hook and no one is barking instructions. This is no Clinton-style war room, yet this lone warrior still looks battle-weary. She says she harbors no illusions of unseating President Vladimir Putin, but that's not the point. "We're fighting so that people raise their voices," she says, not fighting to win. "That costs less." But it's not clear just who is raising their voices in support. Speculation that she is a mercenary front for the Kremlin or oligarch interests has made it difficult...