From Russia with Blood

When election day came, Putin swept to victory with 77 percent of the vote and a turnout of more than two-thirds of the population. Almost as soon as the polls had closed on March 18, his campaign spokesman attributed the success to a single event.

“Turnout is higher than we expected, by about eight to ten percent, for which we must say thanks to Great Britain,” said Andrey Kondrashov.

“Whenever Russia is accused of something indiscriminately and without any evidence, the Russian people unite around the center of power. And the center of power is certainly Putin today.”

The attack on Sergei Skripal was a blatant provocation designed to give Britain—and the West—no choice but to react exactly as they did, and the gambit had paid off handsomely. But it was also part of a far bigger and more sinister picture.

The truth was that Putin had been using deadly force to wipe out his enemies from the first days of his presidency, and the West had long been looking away. Dissenting politicians, journalists, campaigners, defectors, investigators, and critics had been gunned down, poisoned, hit by cars, thrown out of windows, beaten to death, and blown up on Russian soil since his ascent to the Kremlin on the last day of 1999. Turning a blind eye to this brutality was the cost of doing business with an economically renascent nuclear power that had a stranglehold on Europe’s energy supply and a superwealthy class of oligarchs pouring billions into Western economies. Successive leaders had let themselves be lulled into the belief that Putin was a man they could do business with—a man who, with the right coaxing, might finally come in from the cold and integrate the world’s largest country into the warmth of the rules-based liberal world order. That had proved a catastrophic misjudgment.

Putin never really wanted to join the club. He remained what he had always been: a creature of the totalitarian Soviet security state. To his mind the collapse of the USSR, with its mass killings, censorship, political repression, and bellicose isolationism, was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” and he blamed it on the West. The 1989 revolutions that led to the fall of the Iron Curtain, the reunification of Europe, and the accession to the EU and NATO of the former Soviet satellite states—these were outrages to be avenged. So he had risen through the ranks of the KGB and arrived at the Kremlin ready to use all the tactics in his Soviet security-service tool kit to restore Russia to its former glory. While the leaders of the United States and Europe courted him with summits and state visits, handing him the presidency of the G8 and establishing the NATO-Russia Council to foster closer military and political relations, Putin was smiling for the camera, shaking hands, and plotting a silent war on the liberal institutions and alliances upon which the stability of the West depends. The fox was in the chicken coop.

The systematic extermination of enemies, traitors, and opponents was at the core of Putin’s clandestine campaign. Covert killing is a deeply Soviet form of statecraft, a prized lever of power that had rested for more than half a century in the hands of the feared USSR security service from which the new president had emerged. The KGB had led the world in the art and science of untraceable murder, with its poison factories and weapons labs churning out such deadly marvels as plague sprays, cyanide bullets, lipstick pistols, and ricin-tipped umbrellas. Those capabilities had dwindled since the USSR fell—but not on Putin’s watch. While the West welcomed him to the fold, the Russian president was busy reviving the KGB’s targeted killing program. He plowed public money into researching and developing chemical and biological weapons, psychotropic drugs, obscure carcinogens, and other undetectable poisons, and he armed specialist hit squads to hunt down his foes at home and abroad. He restored the fearsome power of the Soviet state security apparatus—enriching and empowering the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency, and giving its agents special worldwide powers to kill enemies of the state with impunity. Anyone who betrayed the motherland, anyone who threatened the absolute power of the Russian state, anyone who knew too much—all put themselves squarely in the Kremlin’s crosshairs. And every dead body sent a signal. If you cross Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, there is no safe place for you on earth.

The covert killing campaign was one crucial line of attack in a much wider war of subversion. As soaring oil prices swelled the state’s coffers, Putin shoveled resources not only into the development of cyberweaponry capable of shutting down foreign infrastructures at the touch of a button but also hacking labs that could gather kompromat on his adversaries. He ramped up Russian espionage operations to Cold War levels, inserting Anna Chapman’s illegal sleeper cell into the American suburbs, pouring spies into every major European capital, and developing a network of agents of influence to push the Kremlin’s agenda in the corridors of Western power. He weaponized Russia’s fearsome organized crime complex, enmeshing the country’s powerful mafia groups ever more deeply with his government and security services and extending their tentacles around the world as an unofficial outgrowth of the Russian state. He grew a sprawling international propaganda machine to disseminate disinformation, assembled a troll army of social media warriors running millions of fake accounts to stoke conspiracy theories and sow chaos in the West, and built black-money channels to finance extremism, terror, and despotism abroad. And he doubled down on defense spending, pumping the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars into a sweeping military modernization program to replace crumbling Soviet weaponry with hundreds of spanking-new bombers, submarines, warships, and intercontinental missiles.

As Putin expanded his web, his use of targeted assassination beyond his own borders grew more brazen. By 2006, he was sufficiently emboldened to pass new laws explicitly giving the FSB a license to kill Russia’s enemies on foreign soil. Since then, his regime’s critics, opponents, and traitors have dropped dead in violent or perplexing circumstances in both the United States and Europe. But nowhere has Putin pursued his killing campaign with more vigor—or greater impunity—than in the United Kingdom.

London proved the perfect playground for superrich Russians on the run from Putin’s regime. Its booming banks and skyrocketing property market gave them a safe place to stash the money they had looted during the smash-and-grab post-Communist era, while its opulent hotels, luxury department stores, and star-studded nightclubs made for appealing places to spend it. England was a land where both an ill-gotten fortune and a tarnished reputation could be laundered to look as white as a sheet in a flash. Its world-class lawyers and accountants were on hand to help siphon cash safely out of Moscow and into respectable-looking UK companies via opaque offshore structures. Its estate agents were ready to hand over the keys to the country’s most prestigious addresses without asking too many questions, and its lacquered PR gurus flocked to polish away any lingering reputational taint from the mucky business of getting rich in Russia. An endowment to an Oxbridge college here, a donation to the ruling party there, a stately home, a child enrolled at Eton—it didn’t take much more to make a new arrival from Moscow look presentable in the loftiest circles of British society.

Before long, billions of pounds’ worth of Russian money was pouring into London’s banks and properties each year. The governments of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron were all anxious to preserve this new lifeline for an economy increasingly dependent on financial services to supplant its dying manufacturing industry. That was why grants of political asylum and investment visas were doled out so liberally to the wealthy new arrivals from Moscow. But it was equally important to cultivate close ties with Putin and smooth the path for British energy investments in Russia. And that was why the establishment discreetly averted its eyes when the Kremlin’s enemies started dropping dead on British soil.

Boris Berezovsky was the linchpin of the community of exiled Russians who fled to Britain after Putin came to power. The brilliant Soviet mathematician had become a billionaire by looting state assets during his time as a high-ranking member of Boris Yeltsin’s government, and he viewed himself as the kingmaker who had plucked Putin out of obscurity. But when his protégé lurched toward autocracy and began quashing all opposition, Berezovsky used the newspapers and TV channels he had amassed to launch blistering attacks. Enraged, Putin had warned publicly that oligarchs who stepped out of line would be crushed and began demolishing Berezovsky’s business empire in Moscow. But to the president’s fury, the oligarch had escaped to the green hills of England with his fortune intact.

Berezovsky found a network of British lawyers and financiers to help spirit his money out of Moscow and stash it out of the reach of the Russian authorities in a byzantine network of offshore vehicles. Then he began using his vast expatriated fortune to finance an international campaign of opposition to Putin’s regime from his new home in the English countryside and to bankroll the activities of a group of dissidents, including the whistle-blowing FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko, who joined him in Britain. Within a matter of months, the man who had helped bring Putin to power had made himself the number one enemy of the Russian state.

Berezovsky and his turbulent associates thought they had found a safe haven in England. They hoped that their grants of political asylum from the government would be enough to save them from the long arm of the Kremlin. They were wrong. One by one, in the years that followed, the lawyers, fixers, dissidents, and businessmen in Berezovsky’s circle would drop dead in strange or suspicious circumstances. One by one, the British authorities would close the cases with no investigation and carry on courting the Kremlin.

There was a single exception. The 2006 murder of Litvinenko with radioactive polonium in a London hotel was an act of provocation the British government could not ignore. The two assassins sent to poison the FSB defector botched their mission so badly that they left a radioactive trail all over the capital. Litvinenko died slowly in the full glare of the world’s media, allowing time for images of his gaunt and hairless frame to be beamed around the globe and for him to solve his own murder by accusing the Kremlin of ordering his killing in a statement issued from his deathbed.

Britain had no option but to respond, and the authorities charged the two assassins with murder in absentia after they fled back to Russia. But even in the face of a blatant act of nuclear terrorism on the streets of the capital, the government’s reaction was muted. The UK expelled a mere four Russian diplomats, and four British embassy staff were sent packing from Moscow in return. When Russia refused to extradite the two killers, foreclosing any hope of a criminal trial, the government stood in the way of efforts by the dead man’s widow, Marina Litvinenko, to secure a public inquiry into her husband’s murder. Theresa May personally intervened to quash the possibility during her tenure as home secretary, citing the need to protect “international relations” with Russia. It was a full decade later, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea had made reparation with the Kremlin impossible, that the government finally relented to demands for the inquiry, which ultimately found that Litvinenko had likely been assassinated on Putin’s orders. But back in 2006, Britain had too much at stake to pick an unwinnable fight with the Kremlin.

The cold, mercenary reality was that Anglo-Russian business was booming. The UK had become the biggest investor in Russia’s energy sector by the time Litvinenko was poisoned, and the British oil giant BP signed on to a historic joint venture with the then state-owned Russian energy company Gazprom just a week after the two countries played tit for tat with their diplomatic expulsions over the murder. Russian energy firms were investing big in the UK, too, and initial public offerings by Moscow firms were by then worth tens of billions of pounds each year to the London Stock Exchange. All that was a critical prop to the British economy, and it suited Putin just fine. Inward investment in Russia, and the global expansion of homegrown business, meant more rubles to pour into his campaign of foreign subversion, cyberweaponization, and military revampment. And as much as Putin was a creature of his Soviet training, he was also a kleptocrat. He wanted to make Russia great again, and he intended to enrich himself and his inner circle in the process. The more money that flowed into Moscow, the more he could siphon off into the secret network of offshore accounts, trusts, and properties that would ultimately make him, by some estimates, the world’s richest man.

But still, the diplomatic pain caused by the row over Litvinenko’s murder impeded Anglo-Russian relations at a time when Britain wanted nothing more than to stay in step with the rest of the West and keep the Kremlin close. In the years that followed, when Russian émigrés and their British fixers died with ever greater frequency, the authorities were all the more steadfast in their determination to look the other way. And the more the British government showed itself willing to shut its eyes, the more emboldened Russia became.

The reasons for Britain’s inaction were more than just financial. Russia’s murderous organized crime and state security complex began encroaching on the West just as the September 11, 2001, attacks drew all the firepower of Anglo-American intelligence and security machinery into the war on terror. Security-service officials at MI5 and counterterrorism detectives at Scotland Yard tasked with tracking organized crime groups and monitoring the subversive activities of foreign states were yanked off the job and redeployed in the fight against jihadist extremism while foreign intelligence chiefs at MI6 downsized the Russia desk and poured the lion’s share of their resources into the Middle East. When Berezovsky and his fellow exiles arrived in Britain, they brought with them extensive organized crime connections and came tailed by teams of Russian spies, turning London into a crucible of Russian secret service and mafia activity just as Britain’s security and intelligence establishment had taken its eye off the ball.

The few officials who did remain dedicated to monitoring Russian threats in Britain faced a Sisyphean challenge. Russia’s criminal networks are so deeply entangled with its state security apparatus, and Berezovsky and his associates were themselves so extensively connected to organized crime, that when threats were detected it was often impossible to tell whether they emanated from the government, the mafia, or both. The FSB would frequently enlist organized crime hoodlums to carry out crude hits on its behalf, while powerful mafia groups could enlist moonlighting state assassins to conduct more refined killings if required. And when the state was involved in a murder, the sophistication of its methods was often way beyond the ken of Scotland Yard, let alone the rural police forces that often picked up the job when rich Russians dropped dead in the home counties. FSB assassins were expert at disguising murders as accidents or suicides—even using drugs and psychological tactics to drive their targets into taking their own lives—and the state’s weapons labs had developed an arsenal of undetectable poisons designed to make a murder look like a natural death. Even if Britain’s spy agencies had strong intelligence pointing to an assassination, it was often impossible to share classified material with a court or a coroner without blowing the cover of sources and revealing highly sensitive methods. In such instances, it was easier to pronounce a death unsuspicious than to stoke diplomatic tension and public alarm over an accusation of political assassination that would be unlikely to stand up to judicial scrutiny.

As Russia’s activities in the wider world grew more blatantly hostile, the British authorities had a new consideration to add to the calculus. Fear. The government’s security advisers began cautioning that the Kremlin could inflict massive harm on Britain by unleashing cyberattacks, destabilizing the economy, or mobilizing elements of Britain’s large Russian population to cause disruption. Deep police funding cuts following the financial crisis of 2008 had weakened the UK’s law enforcement capabilities, and a decade of focus on jihadist terror had withered the institutional expertise on Russia within the security and intelligence services, leaving the nation exposed and vulnerable. Defense chiefs warned that Putin’s modernized military far outstripped the diminished capabilities of the austerity-ravaged British armed forces, and there were concerns that Russia could be creeping toward a full-scale conflict with the West as its actions became more overtly hostile. Suddenly, the specter of general war with Russia was being discussed in the corridors of Whitehall. If it came, the mandarins agreed, it could happen very rapidly—and Britain would be unprepared. This was no longer just about business. There were genuine existential threats to consider when the government calculated its response to Russian operations on its soil.

Putin had been flexing his muscles more boldly since the murder of Litvinenko. He set his weapons modernization plans in motion within weeks of the killing, quickly followed by a wave of crippling cyberattacks on Estonia, and embarked upon his first foreign military adventure with the invasion of Georgia in 2008. Cyberattacks on Germany, France, and the United States were to come, accompanied by Russia’s increasingly overt financing and support for far-right and separatist groups across Europe. But as the aggressions grew more audacious, the British government found itself stuck between its more hawkish American ally and European partners who remained heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas and who had no appetite for a fight. The invasion of eastern Ukraine was the tipping point.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March of 2014 marked the end of any serious hope that Putin could be coaxed into the liberal fold. Russia was suspended from the G8, the NATO countries ceased all political and military cooperation with Moscow, and the United States and European Union imposed scorching sanctions that, coupled with the slump in global oil prices, threatened to cripple the Russian economy. Undeterred, Putin pressed on with his latest adventure, sending tanks and heavy weapons over the border into the turbulent Donetsk and Luhansk regions and sparking a full-blown armed conflict with the Ukrainian government. Further waves of sanctions followed. Then pro-Russian forces shot down Malaysia Airlines flight 17, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, over eastern Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and fifteen crew members on board—and only then did the British government finally relent and announce a public inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko.

Even after that, the UK authorities continued to suppress evidence of the full scale of Russia’s killing campaign on British soil. It would take an indiscriminate chemical weapons attack on the streets of Britain to force the government to confront the menace it had long ignored.

By the time Sergei and Yulia Skripal collapsed in Salisbury, the West had finally woken up to the severity of the Russian threat. The attack came hot on the heels of a series of jaw-dropping moves by the Kremlin: brazen meddling in the US election in favor of Donald Trump; interference in democracies across Europe with state-sponsored hacking, internet trolling, and financing for extremist groups; an attempted coup in Montenegro; increasingly malignant cyberattacks on Western governments; and a military intervention in support of the Syrian regime as it unleashed wave after wave of chemical weapons attacks on its own people. Russia’s activities amounted to an all-out asymmetric war of subversion, using the full spectrum of state powers to disrupt and destabilize its Western enemies.

At the same time, Britain’s intelligence agencies were facing scrutiny from their US counterparts over their failure to get to grips with the escalating spate of Russian assassinations in the UK. US intelligence officials had been watching the pattern of deaths from across the Atlantic with mounting alarm, concerned that it could spread to American shores. They had for years been sharing intelligence with MI6 connecting the deaths of the men in Berezovsky’s circle and others to Russia and had looked on with consternation as every case was shut down by the authorities without investigation. Fears that Britain’s quiet complicity could be emboldening Putin to ramp up his killing campaign had intensified in 2015, following the strange death in Washington, DC, of Mikhail Lesin, a onetime Kremlin henchman who was preparing to start talking to the US Department of Justice. Relations between senior Russia officials at MI6 and their CIA counterparts were becoming increasingly strained.

Then in 2017, the summer before Skripal’s collapse, a team of investigative journalists at BuzzFeed News published a series of stories laying bare the pattern of Russian assassinations on British soil––and exposing the government’s attempts to suppress the evidence.

When Russia struck again, the prime minister no longer had any option but to take a stand. But the tough rhetoric and waves of diplomatic expulsions that followed the nerve-agent attack on the Skripals did not perturb a gleeful Putin as he careered toward reelection. Just hours after Theresa May accused Russia of a state-sponsored assassination attempt on British soil, the body of another Kremlin enemy was discovered. Nikolai Glushkov was a close friend and business associate of Berezovsky’s and an avowed foe of Putin. He was found at his home on the London outskirts, strangled with a dog leash. Counterterrorism officers from Scotland Yard quickly took command of the investigation, but the killer had not left a trace.

Meanwhile, Sergei and Yulia Skripal were making a miraculous recovery. That was thanks to the expertise of the scientists at Porton Down and the state-of-the-art treatments they had developed for nerve-agent poisoning. Detective Sergeant Bailey, the off-duty doctor and nurse, and the children from the green were all discharged from the hospital, and when they were well enough, the Skripals were moved to a secure location to complete their recovery. A multimillion-pound military cleanup operation was under way in nine Salisbury locations that had been contaminated with the nerve agent, and it seemed for a while that the British authorities might have contained the crisis without any lives being lost. Then, four months after the initial attack, news broke that two more people in Salisbury had been hospitalized with symptoms of Novichok poisoning.

Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley were a couple in their midforties who had fallen on hard times. On a balmy summer day at the end of June, Rowley had found what he thought would make an elegant gift for his girlfriend while out rifling through local trash cans and dumpsters: a gold Nina Ricci perfume box containing a small bottle with a long nozzle attached to the lid. He took it home and gave it to Sturgess, who sprayed it on both wrists.

The bottle did not contain perfume. It was the vessel that had been used by Russia’s assassins to transport their Novichok to Salisbury, and Sturgess had doused herself with ten times the amount of nerve agent used on the Skripals. She died in the hospital just over a week later. Some of the Novichok had splashed onto Rowley’s hands, but he narrowly pulled through and woke from his coma two days after his girlfriend had died. There were no pallbearers at Sturgess’s funeral. The government’s public-health watchdog had put special measures in place to protect the mourners from contamination.

Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism command had deployed its finest officers to hunt the state agents who had deployed the Novichok, but for six months there was no sign that their inquiry had turned up any leads. Then, on September 5, the country’s premier police force announced two men were being charged with the attempted assassination of the Skripals. They were identified as two serving members of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, who had entered Britain under false names. Police released photos of both men along with CCTV stills of the grinning assassins arriving at Gatwick Airport, traveling to a shabby hotel in East London, and carrying out a reconnaissance mission to Salisbury before returning to the city on March 4 to deploy the nerve agent.