Critics of Putin have the unhappy coincidence of turning up dead.
LONDON — President Vladimir Putin probably approved a plan by Russia’s FSB security service to kill a former agent-turned-Kremlin critic who died after drinking tea laced with radioactive poison, a British judge said Thursday in a strongly worded report that led Moscow to accuse Britain of souring bilateral relations.
Judge Robert Owen, who led a public inquiry into the 2006 killing of Alexander Litvinenko, said he was certain that two Russian men had given Litvinenko tea containing a fatal dose of radioactive polonium-210 during a meeting at a London hotel in November 2006.