The form of the attacks has varied, from underwear daubed with the nerve agent novichok and polonium-laced tea to more straightforward assassinations by bullet, but throughout Vladimir Putin’s 23 -year rule, Kremlin critics, journalists and defected spies have met with similarly ruthless treatment for opposing the Russian president.
The fatal crash of a private jet carrying the Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin two months after he spearheaded a mutiny against Russia’s top army brass two months ago appeared to have added a new method to the Kremlin’s extensive assassination menu.
While the Kremlin on Friday insisted it was “a complete lie” that it had anything to do with the jet crash, Prigozhin’s longstanding feud with the military and the armed uprising he led in June would have given the Russian state ample motive for revenge.
His death, along with the deaths of other members of the mercenary group who were onboard, including Dmitry Utkin, described as its founder or co-founder, also follows a pattern of action by the Russian state against its critics, including journalists, human rights activists and former allies who fell out of line.
Below are some of the more prominent cases of documented killings or attempted killings.
Poisoning
Russian intelligence officials have turned political poisonings into something of an art form. Soviet scientists are believed to have worked for decades to develop colourless and odourless poisons. According to an interview in 1954 with a KGB operative, the testing of poisons was carried out on living prisoners.
Whereas poisoning may seem like an archaic way to kill, observers have argued that it offers the advantage of being a discreet method of assassination. It can be carried out without immediate detection, allowing the perpetrator to flee the crime scene and offering the Kremlin plausible deniability.
The two poisonings most closely associated with Putin both occurred in the UK.
Russia’s dark methods first came to international attention during the case of Alexander Litvinenko, a Putin opponent who died of polonium-210 poisoning in London in 2006. Shortly before his death, Litvinenko told journalists the FSB security service was still operating poison laboratories dating from the Soviet era. A British inquiry later concluded that Russian agents had killed Litvinenko, probably with Putin’s approval.
More than a decade later, Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer who had become a double agent for the UK, survived a poisoning with a nerve agent called novichok in Salisbury. Novichok means “newcomer” and refers to a group of nerve agents developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s to elude international restrictions on chemical weapons.
Shortly after the assassination attempt on Skripal, which later led to the death of another local resident, Dawn Sturgess, who inadvertently sprayed the novichok on her wrists, Putin labelled the double agent as a “traitor” and a “scumbag”. In a separate interview not much later, Putin said he could forgive everything except for “treachery.”
Moscow also enjoys a long history of going after members of the political opposition.
In August 2020, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny – now jailed – fell ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow. Navalny was later flown to Germany for treatment, where doctors established that he had been poisoned with novichok.
An investigation by the website Bellingcat identified at least eight FSB operatives who were allegedly behind Navalny’s poisoning. One of the operatives allegedly involved later confessed to his role in the plot in a phone call with the opposition leader.
Russian security services have also seemingly poisoned less prominent Russians, including the writer Dmitry Bykov and Pyotr Verzilov, an unofficial spokesperson for the punk art collective Pussy Riot, who was evacuated to Germany for treatment shortly after falling ill.
There have been indications that Russia has continued the practice since Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine.
Most recently, an investigative report by the independent news outlet the Insider alleged that three Russian journalists known for their anti-Kremlin stances might have been poisoned in foreign countries, including Germany and Georgia.
Shootings
While poison has emerged as the weapon of choice in Putin’s Russia, several Kremlin critics have also been shot dead over the years.
In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a Novaya Gazeta journalist who reported on human rights abuses, was killed outside her flat in Moscow after returning home from the supermarket. It was Putin’s 54th birthday, and Politkovskaya was 48. Five men and one former police officer were later convicted of the murder, but those close to Politkovskaya described them as mere hired guns, carrying out somebody else’s orders.
Arguably most brazen was the the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, a prominent opposition leader, in central Moscow in 2015. Nemtsov was shot four times in the back by an unknown assailant within view of the Kremlin.
A joint investigation by journalists from the Insider, the BBC and Bellingcat revealed that Nemtsov had been shadowed by FSB agents for almost a year before he was assassinated on a bridge.
While most political assassinations have occurred on Russian soil, Moscow has also been accused of shooting its opponents abroad.
Most notably, in the summer of 2019, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Georgian citizen who fought against Russia during the second Chechen war in the early 2000s, was shot twice in the head at close range in Kleiner Tiergarten, a park in central Berlin.
A German judge jailed Vadim Krasikov, an alleged FSB agent, for life for what he called a “painstakingly planned” hit job, saying Russian security services had provided Krasikov with a false identity, fake passport and the resources to carry out the assassination.
Krasikov remains the only suspected FSB agent to have been caught and convicted abroad for a murder. Moscow has reportedly been trying to involve him in a prisoner exchange with the west.
Unexplained deaths
There also have been reports of prominent Russian executives dying under mysterious circumstances including apparent suicides or falls from great heights.
In 2013, Boris Berezovsky was found apparently hanged in the bathroom of his Ascot home. Berezovsky was a former Kremlin insider turned vocal critic of Putin’s government who went into self-imposed exile in the UK in the early 2000s.
Investigations and public inquiries into the death have not conclusively established anything beyond the officially determined cause of suicide, but a German forensic scientist retained by members of the businessman’s family said his examination of autopsy photographs had led him to conclude that Berezovsky had not killed himself.
Many of Berezovsky’s associates have also died in mysterious circumstances, including Badri Patarkatsishvili, a Georgian oligarch and business partner, and Nikolai Glushkov and the Yukos oil founder Yuri Golubev, two associates who were found dead in London.
Another former Kremlin insider, Mikhail Lesin, who founded the English-language television network RT, formerly Russia Today, was discovered dead in a hotel room in Washington DC in 2015, where he had been invited to attend a fundraising dinner.
Once a power player in Putin’s rise to power, Lesin was surprisingly dismissed from his position in the Kremlin’s influential media apparatus. After a lengthy investigation, a US autopsy concluded he died as a result of “blunt force injuries” and not a heart attack, as the Russian state media had reported.
One mystery that will likely remain unsolved for ever is the death of Kirill Stremousov, the Russia-installed deputy governor of Kherson province in Ukraine, who according to Russian officials died in a car crash on the day that Ukrainian forces liberated the city of Kherson in the autumn of 2022.
Stremousov, one the most prominent proponents of Russian occupation who was known for his aggressive statements on social media, publicly suggested in one of his daily videos that Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, a close friend of Putin’s, should shoot himself. His murky death was quickly attributed by some to Russian security services, which needed to get rid of an inconvenient loudmouth no longer useful to the authorities.
