The Brief // By Ben FrankelAlexey Navalny is but the Latest in a Long Line of Putin’s Victims

Not everyone who has a quarrel with Russian President Vladimir Putin dies in violent or suspicious circumstances, but enough of them do. Moreover, enough of them die in practically identical manner, which may indicate that the agents who killed them all had similar training and experience.

Opposition leader Alexey Navalny joins a long list of Putin’s critics who experience the violence of Putin’s agents.

Here are three quick notes:

1. Poison as the Preferred Method of Killing
Poisoning has been by far the Russian intelligence services’ favorable method of killing critics of the regime, at home and abroad.

Andrew E. Kramer, writing in the New York Times (“Don’t Drink the Tea: Poison Is a Favored Weapon in Russia”), notes that

Poison, though redolent of medieval intrigue, has been a favored tool of Russian intelligence agencies for more than a century. And critics of the Kremlin and independent analysts say the weapon remains in use today. While other countries, including the United States and Israel, have targeted killing programs, they are strictly limited to counterterrorism efforts. Russia, by contrast, has been accused of targeting a wide variety of opponents both at home and abroad.

After a series of assassinations and attempted assassinations of dissidents, journalists, defectors and opposition leaders in Russia and abroad over the past two decades, researchers have concluded the post-Soviet government has turned to its poison arsenal as a preferred weapon.

“If you’re a regime that is willing to kill enemies at home and abroad, you have to decide on your priorities: ease, subtlety or theatricality,” Mark Galeotti, director of the London-based firm Mayak Intelligence, told the Washington Post. “For the second and third, poison is often a good bet.”

“No matter whether it’s an attempted murder or just scare tactics, poisonings are pretty much always somehow connected to the security services,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote in a public post to Telegram.

“Apart from its sadism — excruciating pain and, in case of survival, lasting health effects and a long and difficult road to rehabilitation — this method gives the authorities plausible deniability,” opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was poisoned twice, in 2015 and in 2017, wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post.

Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist who co-wrote a book about Russian exiles, told the Washington Post that Moscow and its allies had used poison to target dissidents abroad during the Cold War.