Word: putin
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Alexander Litvinenko didn't mince words. On Oct. 19, at a public meeting in London, he introduced himself as a former Russian kgb officer, and proceeded to accuse President Vladimir Putin of sanctioning the murder two weeks earlier of a crusading Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya. Litvinenko, who fell out with his erstwhile employers after claiming they had ordered him to assassinate Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch and high Russian official of the Yeltsin years, now exiled, had met Politkovskaya on several occasions. At one of their last meetings, he said, she had told him about threats she'd been receiving...
...killed with a ricin-tipped umbrella while waiting for a bus, in a case that has never been solved. Just as in that Markov case, the death of Litvinenko has already given rise to a flurry of conspiracy theories, including speculation among defenders of Putin's government that the poisoning had been arranged by Russian exiles or Western intelligence agencies to discredit Moscow...
...little doubt about who's to blame. In a message dictated two days before his death and read out by his friend Alexander Goldfarb to the press, Litvinenko, 43, said: "You may succeed in silencing one man, but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life...
...spokesman for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service stated bluntly that he was "not the kind of person for whose sake we would spoil bilateral relations [with Britain]," and a Kremlin spokesman said talk about any possible role it may have had in the affair was "sheer nonsense." Sergei Yastrzhembsky, Putin's chief envoy to the European Union, suggested that the murder might be part of "a well-orchestrated campaign or plan to consistently discredit Russia and its leader." Asked about the matter at a Russia-E.U. meeting in Helsinki on Friday, Putin described it as a tragedy and offered...
...Kris Kringle. His rounded cheeks, his careless hairlessness, even his great red spot all left him looking disarmingly rumpled. That was a guy who not only could dismantle an empire and knock down a wall but would also remember to keep caramels in his pocket for the grandkids. Vladimir Putin, by contrast, is less gentle grandpa than live mink. President George W. Bush may have looked into Putin's soul and been reassured by what he saw, but he might have found less to like if he'd paid closer attention to the Russian leader's beady eyes and take...