A Very Expensive Poison (39 page)
Read A Very Expensive Poison Online
Authors: Luke Harding
(
Top left
) Boris Berezovsky, Litvinenko’s mercurial patron, led a campaign to overthrow Putin. He fought a billion-pound legal battle with his one-time friend Roman Abramovich (
right
) … and lost. He was found dead in 2013 in Berkshire.
Alexander Perepilichnny (
left
), a Russian whistleblower, collapsed and died in November 2012 outside his home in Surrey. A rare Himalayan fern,
Gelsemium elegans
, used by Chinese and Russian assassins, was found in his stomach: the likely cause of death.
The Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov at a rally. Nemtsov was a fearless critic of Vladimir Putin. He exposed official corruption and the president’s covert war in Ukraine in a series of dissenting pamphlets.
… And lying dead. In February 2015 a Chechen assassin shot Nemtsov a few hundred metres away from the Kremlin, as he walked home with his Ukrainian girlfriend. Fifty thousand mourners came to his funeral, filling Moscow’s embankment.
In spring 2014, Putin seized Crimea and choreographed a pro-Russian rebellion in eastern Ukraine. He sent tanks, weapons and undercover soldiers to help rebels – and a Buk anti-aircraft missile system, seen (
circled in red
) trundling through the Ukrainian countryside.
On 17 July 2014, the Buk’s crew shot down Malaysian Airlines MH17, en route to Kuala Lumpur, with 298 people on board. They mistook it for a Ukrainian military aircraft. All perished. It was a terrible mistake, and one that flowed from Putin’s contempt for Ukraine’s sovereignty.
Marina Litvinenko (
above
) arriving at the High Court in London for the much-delayed public inquiry into her husband’s murder. Britain’s Conservative-led government initially opposed the inquiry, fearing it would annoy Putin. There were sixty-two witnesses. Much of the evidence, which ran to 10,000 pages, had been kept secret for eight years.
In September 2015, Putin bombed Syria and (
below, in December
) opposition-controlled parts of Damascus in support of his ally President Bashar al-Assad. It was the first time since the Cold War that the Kremlin had launched a major military action outside the borders of the ex-Soviet Union.
Luke Harding is a journalist, writer and award-winning foreign correspondent with the
Guardian
. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the
Guardian
’s bureau chief in Moscow. The Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the Cold War, in part because of his reporting on Alexander Litvinenko’s murder.
He is the author of four previous non-fiction books:
The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man; Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia; WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy
; and
The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken
(the last two co-written with David Leigh).
Two have been made into Hollywood movies. Dreamworks’s
The Fifth Estate
, based on
WikiLeaks
, was released in 2013. Director Oliver Stone’s biopic of Edward Snowden, adapted from
The Snowden
Files
, is due in 2016. In 2014, Luke was awarded the James Cameron prize. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages.
Luke lives near London with his wife, the freelance journalist Phoebe Taplin, and their two children.
First published in 2016
by Guardian Books, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London, N1 9GU
and by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,
74–77 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2016
Copyright © Guardian News and Media Ltd, 2016
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ISBN 978–1–78335–095–7