On 7 July the BBC premier news documentary ‘Newsnight ‘http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/7494585.stm showed a story on the murder of Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko in London http://www.jamestown.org/edm/article.php?article_id=2373210
In the same week NUNS deputy Davyd Zhvannia revealed more details about his views that Viktor Yushchenko was not poisoned. The connections between the Yushchenko’s poisoning and Litvinenko’s murder are closer than at first seems.
The BBC report was not coincidentally shown on the anniversary of the London terrorist bombings (Britain has its “7/7” to America’s “9/11”). This in of itself showed to what degree Russia, which was the first to join the US in the Global War on Terror, as it is called, in September 2001 is itself a terrorist state.
BBC Newsnight quoted British intelligence as saying that Litvinenko’s murder was a ‘state-backed conspiracy by Russia’. ‘We very strongly assess the Litvinenko case to have had some state involvement, there are very strong indications that it was a state action’, the British intelligence told BBC Newsnight, adding, ‘It was the Russian state, not a rogue element
– the polonium itself is evidence of state involvement’.
This view of Russian state involvement has cross party support in Britain.
The Conservative Party Shadow security minister Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones told BBC Newsnight that her party believed the Litvinenko case was one of that involved the Russian state:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/7494585.stm
British intelligence revealed to BBC Newsnight not only details of the Litvinenko murder but also a foiled attempt to murder Russian oligarch exile Boris Berezovskiy in summer 2007. The assassin, a Chechen gangster, was deported and banned from entering Britain. Russia’s accusations that the Chechen rebels are ‘terrorists’ when the Russian state itself uses Chechen gangsters for terrorist attacks abroad shows to what degree Russia is a terrorist state.
British intelligence regard Russiaas the third most dangerous threat to their country, distracting the intelligence services from dealing with Islamic terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Thirty Russian intelligence agents operate from London’s Russian embassy, the same number as in the Soviet era.
The Russian state has legal sanction to undertake “mokriye deli”, as the KGB called them, abroad. The law was changed 3 years ago to permit the Russian state to murder its opponents abroad. Chechen rebel leaders have been murdered in Azerbaijan and Qatar (in the latter case SVR agents were captured). Russia’s return to “mokriye deli” is a return to the same tactics that led to Soviet secret police murder of Ukrainian nationalist leaders Symon Petliua in 1926 in Paris, Yevhen Konovalets in Rotterdam in 1938, Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera in the late 191957 and 1959 in Munich.
There is a huge contrast between the British investigation of the Litvinenko murder, that quickly laid charges against Andrei Lugovoi (elected to the State Duma this year in the Liberal Democratic Party) and Ukraine’s totally inept investigation of Yushchenko’s poisoning.The most intriguing aspect of this poisoning case is Yushchenko’s reaction to it. Any normal person would be interested in revenge – whether Ukrainian or Western. As an American said to me in Kyiv with knowledge of US organised crime: ‘If I had tried to poison you and you had survived I (as the assassin) would EXPECT you to come after me’.
But, Yushchenko did not come after anybody!
Where is Yushchenko’s normal human desire for revenge? Why did he keep the cynical Sviatoslav Piskun as Prosecutor in 2005 and try to bring him back in 2007?
Is he really expecting us to believe the attempt at poisoning was done at then deputy SBU Chairman Volodymyr Satsiuks dacha? I agree with Zhvannia that only a ‘debil’ would try to assassinate somebody in their own home.
Yushchenko was eating bread and salt, melon and many other foods throughout the election campaign in many parts of Ukraine and the opportunity to feed him poisoned food was widely available, if somebody had wanted to.
Yushchenko’s timid reaction to his poisoning is therefore to me the most telling and the most intriguing. The British government quickly investigated Litvinenko’s murder and had the self confidence and patriotism to stand up to Russia. Opposition leader Andrei Sidelnikov was granted asylum in Britain at the same time as British intelligence leaked information to BBC Newsnight when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown knew he would be meeting Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev at the Tokyo G8 summit.
Could it be that there was no desire for revenge because there was no poisoning? I remain sceptical at Zhvannia’s claims because two decades of dealing with this region has warned me that the truth is always somewhere in the middle of two contradictory claims, Yushchenko’s claim to have been poisoned and Zhvannia’s claim that he wasn’t. The widely reported claim that there was ‘Russian spetsnaz’ in Kyiv in the orange revolution is now known to have been false as these units were Crimean BARS spetsnaz from the MVD (in the 1990s they had been National Guard unit) to whom Kuchma gave an anti-Yushchenko speech in late August of that year.
That there was a threat to Yushchenko’s life in the 2004 elections would seem to be true. Two Russian citizens were arrested on the eve of round 2 of the 2004 elections with explosives near Yushchenko’s campaign headquarters and both were convicted. But, surprisingly the case was practically held in secret, hardly reported by the Ukrainian media and never by the Western media and both have been released.
Rather than delving deeply into Zhvannia’s claims, made in revenge for the artificial case against him to strip him of citizenship, we should instead ask why has Yushchenko never had a desire to investigate the poisoning? Such a desire would have been shown if he had chosen other people to head the prosecutor’s office rather than Piskun and Medvedko. Yushchenko’s inept organisation of the prosecutor’s office is even worse as he issued a state medal to Potebenko in spring 2007 who as prosecutor under Kuchma covered up his involvement in Georgi Gongadze’s murder. In a European democratic state Potebenko would have been criminally charged, not given a medal.
If indeed, contrary to Zhvannia’s claims, there was an attempt to assassinate Yushchenko and he preferred to ignore it in the interests of good relations with Russia and reconciliation with Viktor Yanukovych then the president sent a wrong signal to the Donetski and to Moscow. Not seeking revenge or justice (or both) sends a signal to those who undertook such an act that you are weak. Criminals would expect somebody to retaliate, especially if the object of the assassination survived it. Yet, Yushchenko never retaliated and the oligarchs returned from their Moscow banni or Monaco palaces in autumn 2005 to live peacefully in Ukraine.
