Navalny, Prigozhin: Kremlin foes have faced death, poison under Putin’s reign

Sounds familiar?

This is sounds similar to the fate meted out to mercenary group Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, when he lost his life ina plane crash, just two months after he led a rebellion towards Moscow, aiming to overthrow the Russian military leadership.

There also have been reports of prominent Russian executives dying under mysterious circumstances, including falling from windows, although whether they were deliberate killings or suicides is sometimes difficult to determine.

The attacks range from the exotic — poisoned by drinking polonium-laced tea or touching a deadly nerve agent — to the more mundane of getting shot at close range. Some take a fatal plunge from an open window. Kremlin political critics, turncoat spies and investigative journalists have been killed or assaulted in a variety of ways.

Here are a list of people who faced the sharper end of dagger after criticising Kremlin

Alexei Navalny

Alexei Navalny, was vocal critic of Vladimir Putin. In August 2020, the opposition leader Navalny fell ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow. The plane landed in the city of Omsk, where Navalny was hospitalized in a coma. Two days later, he was airlifted to Berlin, where he recovered.

When Germany, France and Sweden tested samples, they confirmed that Navalny had been poisoned by a potent Soviet-era nerve agent known as Novichok

Boris Nemtsov

The highest profile killing of a political opponent was that of Boris Nemtsov. Once deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, Nemtsov was a popular politician and harsh critic of Vladimir Putin. On a cold February night in 2015, he was gunned down by assailants on a bridge adjacent to the Kremlin as he walked with his girlfriend in a death that shocked the country.

Vladimir Kara-Murza

Prominent opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza survived what he believes were attempts to poison him in 2015 and 2017. He nearly died from kidney failure in the first instance and suspects poisoning but no cause was determined. He was hospitalized with a similar illness in 2017 and put into a medically induced coma. His wife said doctors confirmed he was poisoned. Kara-Murza survived, and his lawyer says police have refused to investigate. This year, he was convicted of treason and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Alexander Litvinenko

In 2006, Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, a former agent for the KGB and its post-Soviet successor agency, the FSB, felt violently ill in London after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium-210, dying three weeks later. He had been investigating the shooting death of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya as well as the Russian intelligence service’s alleged links to organized crime. Before dying, Litvinenko told journalists the FSB was still operating a poisons laboratory dating from the Soviet era.

Anna Politkovskaya

Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta whose death Litvinenko was investigating, was shot and killed in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building on Oct. 7, 2006 — Putin’s birthday. She had won international acclaim for her reporting on human rights abuses in Chechnya.

Yuri Shchekochikhin

Yuri Shchekochikhin, another Novaya Gazeta reporter, died of a sudden and violent illness in 2003. Shchekochikhin was investigating corrupt business deals and the possible role of Russian security services in the 1999 apartment house bombings blamed on Chechen insurgents.

(With inputs from AP)

Updated: 25 Aug 2023, 07:33 PM IST