Lugovoi’s law-making efforts were clearly helpful to the Kremlin. But this state honour looked like a reward for something else, namely murder. And a sign of high-level political approval. Surely it was no accident?
As Emmerson remarked: ‘Whatever the pretextual justification for that award, its timing on day twenty-two of this inquiry, after a substantial amount of evidence has been called establishing Mr Lugovoi’s involvement in the murder of Mr Litvinenko, is clearly both a provocation by President Putin and the clearest possible message that he identifies himself with Mr Lugovoi.’
The award was probative, the barrister said. In other words it should be added to the evidence that Owen would consider before writing his report, due by Christmas 2015.
After a month of hearings it was clear that Scotland Yard had garnered more than enough material to convict Lugovoi and Kovtun, were they to stand trial. But the question of Putin’s personal culpability was more complex, and harder to answer. Several factors had to be considered: the nature of the Russian state, past and present; the interplay between Putin and his spy agencies; and whether Putin micro-managed security operations or merely set broad policy parameters. Plus, what might be read from previous political killings, of which there were quite a few.
To examine all this, the inquiry turned to Robert Service, professor of Russian history at Oxford University and a distinguished writer and scholar on modern Russia. Service had previously been commissioned to write an expert report for the Berezovsky vs Abramovich case, offering guidance on Russian high politics and big business. He had published full-scale biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. These were model studies: lucid, elegant and readable.
Service was asked to provide information in key areas. The first was to explain internal power structures in Russia, and to say if it was possible for ‘the Russian state’ to order the assassination of a critic. Next, he was to give his expert opinion as to what extent it could be credibly said Putin might commission any such killing, or for it to be carried out with his knowledge or approval. Further questions: did Putin and other senior individuals have links to mafia gangs? Could the state kill someone at the behest of such groups? And what was the Russian administration’s attitude to the ‘rule of law’?
Service’s 2015 report was a highly nuanced document. It made clear what was known, and evidentially based, and what was speculation. It avoided simplification or what Service termed ‘unidimensional’ answers.
Analysing Russia was much tougher than it had been twenty-five years ago, he began. During glasnost and the Yeltsin era there was real information about disagreements at the top of Russian politics. High-ranking insiders, including Yeltsin, wrote revealing memoirs. But with Putin’s rise to power in 2000, access to information in Russia underwent a ‘severe constriction’.
Top-level secrecy came back; the country reverted to a pre-1985 Kremlinology – when observers tried to decipher what might be going on by watching who stood next to whom on Lenin’s Red Square tomb. The impenetrable nature of contemporary Russian power diminished what could be said with confidence.
Service took issue with the way some commentators depicted Putin – ‘as the evil dwarf who operates from his secret cave and controls every minute step taken by his robotic minions’. He argued that there were two flaws to this negative school. First, it didn’t give credit to Putin for anything. Second, Russia from the time of Nicholas II onwards has always been a tricky country to rule. Service argued that Russia’s power vertical – its centralised political hierarchy – was in reality ‘patchily organised’. And, he said, even dictators had less power than they might wish for, and couldn’t ignore popular pressures or demands from Russian society.
Another known unknown was Putin’s relationship with Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB at the time of Litvinenko’s murder. Putin’s backstory was understood; Patrushev was an old KGB associate of his from Leningrad. But it was unclear whether Patrushev secured Putin’s permission for operations in advance.
Service pointed to one piece of evidence – a memoir by Mikhail Kasyanov, Russia’s former prime minister. Putin offered Kasyanov the job in 2000. There was a condition: that Kasyanov didn’t meddle in Russia’s ‘coercive structures’ – the FSB and other security organs – which Putin considered his exclusive ‘turf’. Kasyanov stuck to the deal. Putin fired him anyway in 2004. He joined the opposition.
Kasyanov survived, but many other prominent Putin critics wound up dead. Service cautioned that it was difficult to prove the administration’s complicity in these crimes. Putin’s public response to Litvinenko’s killing illustrated ‘a verbal levity that borders on the macabre’, the professor observed. (Putin mocked Litvinenko’s letter of accusation and said there was no indication he’d suffered a ‘violent death’. ‘The people who have done this are not God, and Mr Litvinenko, unfortunately, is not Lazarus.’)
Putin’s own guilt was unproven. ‘But there can be little doubt about where his feelings lie,’ Service said.
Despite all of these caveats, Service’s conclusions were unambiguous: that Russia’s president set ‘a political climate of tolerance’ in which his agencies could go about their ‘repressive business’ without hindrance.
He went on: ‘The Putin administration has always been demonstrably secretive, manipulative and authoritarian with a ruthless commitment to protecting its interests at home and abroad … It appears to me unlikely that Putin did not exercise – at the very least – some oversight of Patrushev’s activities.’
Speaking from the witness box, Service said his findings might be ‘inscribed on my tombstone’. As befits an Oxford don, he employed a sparkling vocabulary. There was a rare outing for the word ‘desuetude’. (Service complained that the tradition of looking at the big picture had fallen away, replaced by compartmentalised scholarship.) The professor also talked about how Russia’s post-1991 market economy had ‘immiserated’ large sections of the country’s population.
In a supplemental report, Service further considered whether Putin’s Russia could be called – as Litvinenko originally hypothesised – a mafia state. The inquiry wanted to know the answer. Did Putin and senior figures in the Russian government have links with St Petersburg’s Tambov-Malyshev crime gang? Or with members of Russian organised-crime groups in Spain? And what about Litvinenko’s claim that Putin had good relations in the 1990s with the mobster Semion Mogilevich?
Mogilevich is an almost mythical Ukrainian-Russian mafia don who features on the FBI’s list of ten most wanted. The US accuses him of running a trans-national crime empire. It deals in weapons, contract murders, extortion, drug trafficking and prostitution. And operates in America. According to Litvinenko, Putin met Mogilevich and gave him a krysha, or protection. Mogilevich lives in Moscow, shielded by the FSB and beyond the reach of US law enforcement. (Some sources say Mogilevich is now in Hungary.)
Mogilevich crops up in the leaked conversations from 2000 between Ukraine’s president Leonid Kuchma and his intelligence chief Leonid Derkach. Derkach says the mafia boss is on his way to Kiev to sort out various disputes, and adds: ‘He’s on good terms with Putin. He and Putin have been in contact since Putin was still in Leningrad.’ Was this in any way proof?