Will Litvinenkos poisoner stand trial?

last updated 8 January 2015

Britain and Russia

Six months after the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, said Bronwen Maddox in the London Times, Britain has finally brought charges. Andrei Lugovoi, the former KGB agent who met Litvinenko for tea in London the day he fell ill, allegedly slipped him a deadly dose of radioactive polonium. “It was a grisly poisoning, leading to an enormously painful death,” as Litvinenko wasted away over three weeks last fall. The courts had to act. The crime “polluted central London and swept a jangled country back in imagination to the dark plots of the Cold War.” The evidence against Lugovoi is strong—he left a trail of radiation all the way back to Moscow. But the chance that Russia will extradite Lugovoi is “almost zero.”

Why should we extradite him? asked Vladimir Smirnov in Russia’s RIA Novosti. Trumping up charges against a Russian citizen and demanding his extradition are nothing more than attempts to embarrass Russia. Besides, the British have been harboring actual Russian criminals for years. They refuse to hand over exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, for example, though he stands accused of everything from embezzlement to funding the violent overthrow of the state. They even protect Chechen insurgent leader Ahmed Zakaev, who is wanted for leading death squads. Fully 20 percent of all fugitives Russia has registered with Interpol are living freely in Britain. As for me, said Andrei Lugovoi in an interview with Russia’s Moskovskiy Komsomolets, I had no reason to murder Litvinenko. In fact, I, too, was a victim of radiation poisoning. But British and Western media, no doubt influenced by Berezovsky, “have spent many months deliberately and systematically creating an image of me as a perfidious poisoner.”

The Russians obviously aren’t going to budge on this one, said The Economist in an editorial. They’re glad to be rid of Litvinenko, a minor security agent who wrote a book accusing the Kremlin of blowing up Moscow apartment buildings and blaming the crime on Chechens as a pretext for invading Chechnya. Lugovoi will stay in Moscow. And British relations with Russia—“already testy, even by the standards of Russia’s snarling diplomacy”—will further deteriorate. Still, that may not be such a bad thing. “A more robust attitude” toward the increasingly dictatorial President Vladimir Putin is “probably wiser than the kid–glove conciliation” the U.S. and Britain have offered so far.