Owen came in, made a nod, began. He explained why it had taken so long to get to this point – more than nine years – and stressed that he’d drawn on open and closed evidence for his findings of fact. The government hadn’t influenced his conclusions, he said. He stressed: ‘They are mine and mine alone.’ Owen said the open scientific evidence had demonstrated conclusively Lugovoi and Kovtun’s guilt. Then he got to the dramatic finale – Patrushev and Putin had ‘probably approved’ the FSB’s London poisoning operation. From the public rows came cries of ‘Yes!’
The judge thanked all of those who had assisted him. He praised the ‘exemplary’ job done by Scotland Yard and had kind words too for the lawyers and courtroom staff. It was made clear that Sir Robert wasn’t giving interviews. He didn’t need to. His report – completed on budget and done by English judicial standards with Usain Bolt-like speed – spoke for itself.
No one, it appeared, had quite seen this coming. ‘I’m gobsmacked,’ Service told me. ‘It shows the autonomy of the judicial process from politics.’ He added: ‘Anglo-Russian relations are not going to be easy for the next few weeks, months or years.’ Goldfarb was exultant. ‘I didn’t expect the role of Putin,’ he said. ‘Now it’s become a legal fact.’
Marina Litvinenko gave her reaction outside the High Court:
‘I am of course very pleased that the words my husband spoke on his deathbed when he accused Mr Putin have been proved true in an English court with the highest standards of independence and fairness.
‘Now it is time for David Cameron [to act]. I am calling immediately for the expulsion from the UK of all Russian intelligence operatives, whether from the FSB (who murdered Sasha) or from other Russian agencies based in the London embassy.’
As well as a wholesale chuck-out of Russian spies, Marina called for the imposition of targeted economic sanctions and travel bans against named individuals, including the duo of Putin and Patrushev. ‘I received a letter last night from the home secretary promising action. It is unthinkable that the prime minister would do nothing in the face of the damning findings of Sir Robert Owen,’ she said.
In fact, the unthinkable was entirely thinkable. It soon became clear that the government’s response was going to be – well, not much. Speaking in the House of Commons, May described Litvinenko’s murder as a ‘blatant and unacceptable breach of international law’. The probable involvement of Putin’s Kremlin came as no surprise, she said. It was ‘deeply disturbing’. Britain had no illusions about the state of Russia. The subtext: we know what’s going on.
May, however, admitted she had little appetite for imposing punitive measures against Moscow. She told MPs there was a wider national security interest in retaining a guarded engagement, including working with Russia to bring about a peace settlement in Syria. Moreover, it was impossible for Britain to impose a travel ban on a serving head of state, she claimed.
Over in Davos, where he was attending the World Economic Forum, Cameron made a similar point. Litvinenko’s murder was a shocking event but, he indicated, it was necessary to keep working with the Kremlin: ‘Do we at some level have to go on having some sort of relationship with them because we need a solution to the Syrian crisis? Yes, we do but we do it with clear eyes and a very cold heart.’
May announced one token reprisaclass="underline" the treasury was freezing Kovtun and Lugovoi’s UK assets. This didn’t mean much. Back in 2006, Kovtun was so broke he didn’t even own a credit card. He had to get his ex-wife’s boyfriend, Radoslaw Pietras, to pay for his flight from Hamburg to London. It was a fair assumption that his and Lugovoi’s seizable assets were zero.
Critics, led by Marina’s counsel Ben Emmerson, argued that the UK government’s response was weak, wrong-headed, and depressingly predictable. It was predicated on the make-believe that Putin’s strategic and military goals in Syria were the same as Obama’s and Cameron’s: the defeat of Islamic State. They weren’t. Putin’s objectives, instead, were focused on demonstrating Russia’s status as an indispensable international power; shoring up the pro-Moscow regime of Bashar al-Assad; and protecting Russia’s own naval and army assets in Syria’s western Latakia province.
And, it might be argued, bombing previously peaceful areas held by Syria’s moderate opposition in order to drive more refugees towards Germany and Europe. Crushing Isis, if it were on Putin’s list, was somewhere at the bottom.
As some MPs had long argued, a proper response to the report would be to introduce the UK’s own Magnitsky list. Like the US administration in 2012, Downing Street was perfectly capable of banning Russian officials and entities associated with Litvinenko’s murder. Given that many of them had connections with London, this would be a powerful weapon.
Marina Litvinenko was proposing exactly that. As Owen’s report went live, Marina sent a private letter to Downing Street, via the government’s legal department. In it she called for a ‘firm response’. This was needed, she argued, to ‘secure accountability, to deter others from attempting something like this again, and to properly protect the British public’. She invited the prime minister to consider Ukraine-style sanctions against named Russian officials, with asset freezes and visa bans.
She had a list. It featured Putin, Patrushev and Ivanov. And those involved in the polonium chain, including companies: Rosatom, the state nuclear energy corporation; its head Sergei Kirienko; the boss of the Avangard laboratory, Radii Ilykaev; Tenex, Rosatom’s export division; and Tenex’s former CEO, Vladimir Smirnov. Plus an assortment of Russian politicians and prosecutors including prosecutor general Yuri Chaika (the man who in 2006 gave Scotland Yard detectives the run-around) and Alexander Bastrykin, investigative committee chairman.
From Russia, meanwhile, came a glacial response. Lugovoi told Interfax: ‘The results released today just show London’s anti-Russian position once again; the narrowness and lack of desire among the British to find the real reason for the death of Litvinenko.’ Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman, was mocking. He dismissed the inquiry as a ‘quasi-investigation’. And ridiculed the judge’s use of ‘probably’, calling the report an example of ‘subtle English humour’.
The Foreign Office summoned Russia’s ambassador, Alexander Yakovenko, for the dressing-down usual in such cases. Emerging afterwards, the ambassador defiantly accused his British partners of a ‘gross provocation’ that would hurt bilateral ties. The inquiry had ‘whitewashed’ the incompetence of Britain’s spy agencies, he told Russian TV. Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, talked of groundless accusations and unanswered questions. It was ‘a farce’.
The Russian blogosphere hummed with alternative explanations, many of them peddled by salaried Kremlin internet trolls working out of a glassy office in St Petersburg. Their argument: the inquiry was clearly a sham, since some of its sessions were held in secret. Oh, and Litvinenko was actually killed by MI6 and Alex Goldfarb.
Russia’s state of denial put one in mind of King Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, after the oracle proclaims his wife Hermione chaste and him a ‘jealous tyrant’. Leontes declares: ‘There is no truth at all i’ the oracle … this is mere falsehood.’
As might have been predicted, the Kremlin’s reaction was the old cocktail of bluster, evasion and conspiracy theory. For anyone who bothered to look, however, the truth was just a mouse click away. The report was published on the inquiry’s website. Owen’s conclusions and final statement were translated into Russian.