Word: putin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...victim had no doubt where the search for his killer would lead: on his deathbed, he said his death had been ordered by Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia. Russian officials have denied that as a malicious provocation. Not surprisingly, Britain is being punctilious about amassing sufficient evidence before it points a finger in any direction. But if some shadowy figures close to the Kremlin turn out to be responsible for Litvinenko's death, it would be the most astonishing indictment of just how ruthless the modern Russian state...
Litvinenko broke that promise. With Putin having succeeded Yeltsin as President, Litvinenko and his family fled to London in October 2000--shortly after Berezovsky, who was later charged in Russia with fraud, had left for Britain. Litvinenko went to work for the billionaire and lived in a house owned by him. Both agitated against Putin, Berezovsky by financing human-rights and opposition groups and Litvinenko by producing two books furiously critical of the new President. Litvinenko, it is fair to say, didn't like Putin. Last summer he claimed in a letter posted on the Internet that the President...
...truth, and if so, was that his sole motivation for grabbing the limelight? Later, two of the officers in the episode claimed the stunt was bought and paid for by Berezovsky, which probably only heightened the rage of the man who had become the FSB's chief--Vladimir Putin. To Putin, a former KGB officer, what Litvinenko had done "was a major act of treason," says former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, now an exile in the U.S. after having written about Russia's tilt toward authoritarianism. In his book The Lubyanka Gang, Litvinenko, for his part, said...
...Putin, says Alexei Kondaurov, a former KGB general who is now a maverick Duma deputy, is known for keeping score and for a long memory. So the idea that he would want an infuriating gadfly like Litvinenko to disappear is not beyond reason. But the President's defenders scoff at the idea that he might have been involved in Litvinenko's death. Putin, they say, had no need to get rid of Litvinenko; the exile was an irrelevant crank. Milton Bearden, a former CIA spy in Moscow, as well as other experienced intelligence hands, agrees it would be nuts...
...West have rarely hinged on single, or even systematic, human rights abuses. It was not expedient for the democracies to admit the existence of Stalin's Gulag when the priority was working together to defeat Hitler. It may be no more expedient to focus on human rights issues in Putin's Russia as long as Moscow must be kept as an ally in the war on terror, and persuaded to back sanctions against Iran...