Russia: a land of conspiracy
Russia has always been able to inspire great conspiracy stories: from the fate of Anastasia to the many theories and novels such as Day of the Tryffids and 1984, the former Soviet Union has always been a backdrop for intrigue. Now, judging by recent events, it could easily supply a plot worthy of any mobster movie.
Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, is at the centre of an increasingly complicated web of suspicion and speculation, and the Russian media’s silence on it is just as shady. From trade wars to conspiracy, from murder to outright massacre, the blood-tainted list runs long.
Putin’s most recent act of playground bullying is to shut off oil supplies to parts of Eastern Europe, including Germany, after to a spat with the Belarus government last Tuesday. About twelve million barrels of oil flow daily through Belarus in the Druzhba pipeline, but after a series of taxes and penalties imposed by the two countries on each other on the oil flowing between them (a dispute that was started by Russia), Putin’s government has decided to stop oil supplies completely, cutting off about 96% of Poland’s supplies, as well as those of other Eastern European countries.
Russia threatened Belarus with an all-out trade war, and eventually the latter caved in and removed the tax on Russian oil flowing through its borders. The European Union has demanded greater reliability of Russian oil supplies to Europe. But this is only the latest, most public and least “lethal” act of bullying that Putin and his government have been accused of.
Now, the death of ex-KGB security guard Alexander Litvinenko is yet another in a suspicious line of disappearances, all relating, in one convoluted way or other, to Putin.
Last October, journalist Anna Politkovskaya was found dead, gunned down in the elevator in her apartment building in Moscow. An extremely outspoken critic of Putin’s presidency, she had written dozens of articles and a book uncovering atrocities and human rights abuses perpetrated by Russia during the war against Chechnya. She had declared that Ramzan Kadyrov was “a modern-day Stalin” in a radio interview, after having found a video which linked the Chechnyan Prime Minister (instated by the Putin administration) to the kidnapping of two Chechnyan civilians who are still missing.
There is also the question of the bombings of August and September 1999, which killed over three hundred people and destroyed an eight storey building in southern Moscow. Preliminary evidence at all bombing sites seemed to initially point towards Chechnyan terrorists. However, according to independent investigators, which included Litvinenko, none of the few bombers who were actually identified were Chechnyan, but merely branded “Chechnyan sympathizers”.
At the same time, sacks of explosives were found in apartments in the city of Ryazan after investigation by the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, which had until days before been chaired by Putin. The FSB claimed that the sacks had been placed there for an “attack simulation” to gauge how people would respond to a terrorist alert.
The independent investigators who revealed this and other suspicious facts about the bombings; Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin, were both found dead in 2003, murdered within weeks of each other. These are only a few in the long list of people who have stood in Putin’s way, or tried to unveil covert government operations, who have been murdered or have gone missing.
The Litvinenko affair, the latest fiasco, has raised a flurry of questions and produced a string of conspiracy theories. There are still doubts about who is behind his death by polonium-210 poisoning. The main suspect, Dmitri Kovtun, is still in a hospital recovering from the radiation himself.
Polonium is an easy substance to conceal, and if handled properly can do no damage to anyone who doesn’t swallow it. Yet Kovtun has managed to irradiate, as well as himself, about one hundred other people in London alone, and traces of radiation have been found in various European countries he visited on the way. While there is no doubt of his former KGB-related ties with Litvinenko, some question whether he was ever aware of committing a murder.
As for motive, the conspiracy theories abound, a great number of which implicate Putin and his adminstration. The theories run wild, and while some are clearly more outlandish than others, independently of who might have killed Litvinenko, bombed Moscow or issued the various murders, Putin and Russia are still providing material worthy of the best political thrillers.
