A Very Expensive Poison (39 page)

(
Top left
) Boris Berezovsky, Litvinenko’s mercurial patron, led a campaign to overthrow Putin. He fought a billion-pound legal battle with his one-time friend Roman Abramovich (
right
) … and lost. He was found dead in 2013 in Berkshire.

Alexander Perepilichnny (
left
), a Russian whistleblower, collapsed and died in November 2012 outside his home in Surrey. A rare Himalayan fern,
Gelsemium elegans
, used by Chinese and Russian assassins, was found in his stomach: the likely cause of death.

The Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov at a rally. Nemtsov was a fearless critic of Vladimir Putin. He exposed official corruption and the president’s covert war in Ukraine in a series of dissenting pamphlets.

… And lying dead. In February 2015 a Chechen assassin shot Nemtsov a few hundred metres away from the Kremlin, as he walked home with his Ukrainian girlfriend. Fifty thousand mourners came to his funeral, filling Moscow’s embankment.

In spring 2014, Putin seized Crimea and choreographed a pro-Russian rebellion in eastern Ukraine. He sent tanks, weapons and undercover soldiers to help rebels – and a Buk anti-aircraft missile system, seen (
circled in red
) trundling through the Ukrainian countryside.

On 17 July 2014, the Buk’s crew shot down Malaysian Airlines MH17, en route to Kuala Lumpur, with 298 people on board. They mistook it for a Ukrainian military aircraft. All perished. It was a terrible mistake, and one that flowed from Putin’s contempt for Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Marina Litvinenko (
above
) arriving at the High Court in London for the much-delayed public inquiry into her husband’s murder. Britain’s Conservative-led government initially opposed the inquiry, fearing it would annoy Putin. There were sixty-two witnesses. Much of the evidence, which ran to 10,000 pages, had been kept secret for eight years.

In September 2015, Putin bombed Syria and (
below, in December
) opposition-controlled parts of Damascus in support of his ally President Bashar al-Assad. It was the first time since the Cold War that the Kremlin had launched a major military action outside the borders of the ex-Soviet Union.