Word: kremlins
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...imagination immediately came to life. Perfectly time-pegged to the revival of the James Bond franchise, the renegade KGB spy was silenced forever with an obscure poison on British soil: What more could a news or opinion writer ask for? All eyes are now on the dodgy Kremlin. Beyond a doubt, there are numerous criticisms to be made of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But, considering this murder’s context, doesn’t it sound like too linear a plot, a too obvious conspiracy theory...
Vladimir Ryzhkov Independent member of the Russian parliament He knows his attempt to unite fractious democrats in a new liberal opposition party has failed, admits the politician, 40. Also, new rules "make it impossible to have a new political party registered, unless it is endorsed by the Kremlin," he says. He will probably lose his seat in the Duma in the next election because legislation has been introduced banning independent candidates. Still, he is proud of what he's accomplished. "Today, I'm a responsible statesman, and I do all I can to serve my constituency and my country. Tomorrow...
Whether or not anyone in the Kremlin had targeted Litvinenko, his death, coming just weeks after the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya in her Moscow apartment block, has sent a subzero chill over Russia's already frosty civil society. Human-rights campaigners and other Putin critics see the killing as the latest blow to democracy and free speech, part of a steady erosion of civil liberties. Russian democracy was chaotically vibrant just a decade ago, after the collapse of communism in 1991. But these days it is looking fragile. New legislation annuls independent candidates for the Duma (parliament...
Litvinenko, for one, was unafraid to speak out. A former lieutenant colonel in the Russian federal security service (FSB), the successor agency to the KGB, Litvinenko gained notoriety in the 1990s for claiming to have refused a Kremlin order to assassinate the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He had long accused Putin of backtracking on democracy and, in a 2001 book he co-wrote, went so far as to allege that Russian security services organized apartment-block bombings in 1999 that stoked support for a resurgence of the war in Chechnya. He had most recently made public statements tying the Kremlin...
DIED. Alexander Litvinenko, 43, former KGB spy and vocal critic of the Kremlin; of radiation poisoning; in London. He wrote a dramatic statement, released after his death, fingering Russian President Vladimir Putin as the engineer of his murder and describing him as "barbaric and ruthless." (See page...