Vladimir Putin’s foes and critics have often met with violent deaths at the very peak of their conflicts with the Kremlin leader during his nearly quarter-century in power.
Alexei Navalny’s death, which many foreign leaders and supporters say is murder, came after he was banished to an Arctic Circle prison, where he was regularly thrown in a punishment cell, exposed to the elements and significantly malnourished. Western officials including the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and vice-president, Kamala Harris, have directly blamed the Kremlin for his death.
Putin’s other foes have been targeted in diverse ways: shootings, poisonings and even a plane crash. Many of the deaths are never solved and remain listed as accidents and suicides, leaving open the question of just how many of his enemies Putin has dispatched with over the years.
Alexander Litvinenko
A number of former members of the Russian intelligence services who defected to the west have been targeted in poisonings since 2000.
Putin’s dark methods first came to international attention during the case of Alexander Litvinenko, a former member of the FSB security services who had become an opponent of Putin and died of polonium-210 poisoning in London in 2006. His killers, who both had links to the intelligence services, were accused of lacing his tea with a radioactive element. Shortly before his death, Litvinenko told journalists the FSB security service was still operating poison laboratories dating from the Soviet era. A British inquiry concluded that Russian agents had killed Litvinenko, probably with Putin’s approval.
In 2018, agents from the Russian GRU military intelligence agency dispatched to the city of Salisbury daubed a novichok nerve agent on the doorknob of a house belonging to Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer who had been convicted on treason charges and later exchanged with the west. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were nearly killed in the attack. Dawn Sturgess, who lived in Salisbury and had no connection with the Skripals, died when she was exposed to the nerve agent.
Yevgeny Prigozhin
The former head of the Wagner paramilitary group was on poor terms with Putin when he arrived in Moscow in August last year. He was there for talks with Putin after an aborted mutiny that saw his mercenaries seize the city of Rostov and march toward Moscow.
He appeared to have negotiated a truce with the Kremlin, agreeing to evacuate his troops to Belarus and focus on the group’s activities outside Ukraine. But an explosion aboard his Embraer Legacy 600 business jet sent the plane spiralling to the ground, killing Prigozhin, the field commander Dmitry Utkin and eight others on board.
Putin then appeared to eulogise the warlord, saying: “I have known Prigozhin for a long time, since the 1990s. He made some serious mistakes in life, but he also achieved the necessary results for himself but also for the greater good when I asked him.” Soon after, he signed a decree forcing Prigozhin’s troops to swear an oath to Russia’s national flag.
Boris Nemtsov
One of the most brazen killings of a Putin critic was the 2015 shooting of Boris Nemtsov, an opposition leader who had served as deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin and was seen as a potential successor.
Nemtsov was shot four times in the back by an unknown assailant within view of the Kremlin. Five men of Chechen origin were arrested over the attack, but those close to Nemtsov believed the Kremlin was directly involved.
A joint investigation by journalists from the Insider, the BBC and Bellingcat revealed that Nemtsov had been shadowed by FSB agents for almost a year before he was assassinated on a bridge. It also showed that some of the same agents were involved in the poisonings of other top Kremlin critics.
Anna Politkovskaya
The journalist, who had reported critically of Putin and of the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, was shot in her apartment building in Moscow in 2006.
The Novaya Gazeta reporter was one of Russia’s most prominent journalists and the killing had a chilling effect on free media in the country.
Five people were arrested for the killing, but prosecutors admitted they had never found who had ordered the attack. Putin called for the killers to be found, but also said Politkovskaya’s effect on Russian life had been “very minor”.
Unexplained deaths
There also have been reports of prominent Russian executives dying under mysterious circumstances, including apparent suicides or falls from great heights.
In 2013, Boris Berezovsky was found apparently hanged in the bathroom of his Ascot home. Berezovsky was a former Kremlin insider turned vocal critic of Putin’s government who went into self-imposed exile in the UK in the early 2000s.
Investigations and public inquiries into the death have not conclusively established anything beyond the officially determined cause of suicide.
Many of Berezovsky’s associates have also died in mysterious circumstances, including Badri Patarkatsishvili, a Georgian oligarch and business partner, and Nikolai Glushkov and the Yukos oil founder, Yuri Golubev, who were found dead in London.
