Word: russian
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...year of Litvinenko’s birth, the Cold War reached its climax. JFK and Krushchev came very close to igniting a nuclear Apocalypse during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a couple of months before Alexander was born in a remote Russian village. After making a good impression with the intelligentsia at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, he moved up in Soviet bureaucracy. In 1988, as dissent became pronounced all throughout Eastern Europe, Litvinenko joined the infamous KGB, the counter-intelligence agency and symbol of Soviet realpolitick in the West...
...soon as he landed in London loaded with two decades of Russian intelligence information, he became an ardent critic of Vladimir Putin’s administration. He decried the Kremlin’s autocratic tendencies, provided interesting information about Pope John Paul II’s attempted assassination in 1981, and was even quoted saying that a leftist Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi was the “KGB’s man in Italy” during the Cold War. Suffice to say, this left him with a long list of enemies...
Most famously, Litvinenko wrote Blowing Up Russia, which claimed FSB agents had actually planned the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings that killed over two hundred civilians and lead to the second Chechen war. Supposedly, the Kremlin had handcrafted a causus belli sacrificing hundreds of Russian civilians in order to invade Chechnya and prevent its independence. I wonder how many friends he had left at the FSB after such a thesis...
...even for the renegade spy, Nov. 1 was a busy day. An official British citizen since the previous month, he met with former KGB contacts and an Italian informant for sushi and tea. Apparently, he was looking into the recent murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who had been a fervent critic of the Kremlin’s actions in Chechnya. Litvinenko fell ill soon thereafter, and less than three weeks later he died of poisoning at the intensive care unit of the University College Hospital in London. His renegade life might have ended but the media frenzy had just...
...liters Amount of Coca-Cola consumed over five years by Russian Natalya Kashuba, 27, who sued the firm for causing her heartburn and insomnia $118 Amount awarded to Kashuba by a Russian court last week. She is seeking an additional $113,000 in "moral damages...