Putin

last updated 8 January 2015

"The Cold War was supposed to have ended 15 years ago," said David Wise in the Los Angeles Times. But the assassination of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London last week would seem to suggest that Russia has resumed its hostilities toward the West. A fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Litvinenko had fled Russia in 2000 for Britain, where he continued to write and speak out. Two weeks ago, apparently while dining in a London sushi bar, Litvinenko was poisoned with a tiny speck of polonium-210, a radioactive isotope as rare as it is lethal. Within days, he became weak and wasted, his hair fell out, and his vital organs shut down. Before his throat swelled to the point that it literally choked off his speech, Litvinenko said that the FSB—the successor to the infamous KGB—had sent an agent to shadow him, and blamed Putin. "You may succeed in silencing one man," he declared in a posthumously released statement, "but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life."

Litvinenko's accusation has yet to be proven, said Investor's Business Daily, but his "sinister" murder is sobering news for those who hoped Russia would become "a Western-oriented democracy based on the rule of law." In recent years, Putin has arrested scores of his political enemies, shut down TV stations and newspapers critical of him, and put Russia back on the path to dictatorship. For some mysterious reason, Putin's most dangerous critics keep having unfortunate accidents, said David Satter in The Wall Street Journal. In 2004, pro-Western Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko—whom Putin openly opposed—was poisoned with dioxin, severely disfiguring his face. Several weeks ago, Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in the street, in apparent retribution for her work investigating human-rights abuses in Chechnya. Litvinenko had earned Putin's ire many times over: Several years ago, he wrote a book accusing the Russian security services of staging the 1999 bombing of several Moscow apartment buildings—killing 300 people—and blaming it on Chechen separatists. And at the time of his death, Litvinenko was trying to prove that the FSB had murdered Politkovskaya.

The U.S. cannot go on ignoring these crimes, said Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal. President Bush once thought he could see sincerity and friendship in Putin's icy blue eyes, but he was clearly mistaken. In open disdain for U.S. wishes, he's sold nuclear technology and missiles to Iran, and has repeatedly opposed U.N. sanctions on Tehran and North Korea for their illegal nuclear programs. Our first move should be to kick Russia out of the G-8, a club reserved for "mature democracies." Then Bush should revise our Russia policy to reflect reality. "It's time we start thinking of Vladimir Putin's Russia as an enemy of the U.S."