Bob Seely: Putin’s poison is a mixture of message and menace, which is why he likes using it

Dr Robert Seely MBE is author of ‘The New Total War’, ConservativeHome foreign affairs columnist and a former Conservative MP. 

What makes a man want to assassinate an enemy with the poison from an obscure, jungle frog – especially when your target is already rotting in one of your country’s most brutal penal colonies?

Last weekend, Britain, with four others, announced that deceased Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had been murdered with a unique poison, extracted from the dart frog, found only in the South American jungle. Tribes from that continent use the poison in their darts to kill prey, hence the name. Only one man would have ordered this execution, Russian president Vladimir Putin, for whom Alexei Navalny had become a fixation.

State-sponsored assassination, especially from Russia and especially with poisoning, is making a comeback. What’s behind it?

First, assassination fits into Russia’s highly flexible theory of warfare, where all the tools of state power can and are used against an adversary. Putin believes he and his nation have been in conflict with Ukraine since 2005 and the West since 2007. As a former KGB – Russian secret service – operative, he was trained in political warfare: not only assassination but disinformation, subversion, blackmail, as well as terrorism, to name but a few. He knows these tools and appreciates them.

Second, if you are a dictator who cannot stand opposition and is not constrained by traditional morality, killing your enemies is, at least in the short term, an effective way of silencing them. He’s not the first, and he won’t be the last dictator to do so. The Iranian regime, for example, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, murdered many Iranian dissidents across Europe. Putin, since the early 2000s, has used assassination liberally, aided by the Russian state. In 2006, Russia’s Parliament passed Federal Law No. 35-FZ “On Counteraction Against Terrorism” legalising foreign assassination. The same year saw the dramatic killing in London of Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with a radioactive substance, polonium-210 (the 210 refers to the specific isotope).

However, there are other forms of assassination used by Russia apart from poison.

Shooting is an obvious choice. However, it is not subtle, you generally have to get close to the target to conduct the assassination, and given that CCTV is now commonplace throughout Western cities, getting away can be complex even if you can jam some cameras.

Shooting has its use. Russia’s ability to conduct complex overseas operations was thought to have suffered badly after the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats from Europe and the US after the poisoning of Russian defector Sergei Skripal in 2017. Now, Russia’s alphabet soup of secret agencies; internal spies the FSB, external spies the SVR and general dirty work providers, Russia’s GRU Military Intelligence, sometimes work through organised crime or petty criminals located through the dark web. Shooting is a relatively easy alternative for such ‘hire and burn’ assassins, a recent example being the assassination of the former speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament a few months ago. The alleged killer, whose son had died in the war, had been recruited and then cruelly blackmailed by the Russians; kill the politician and we will tell you where your deceased son’s body is.

There are other forms of murder used reasonably frequently. Death by ‘suicide’ by jumping – being thrown – from high buildings has become almost commonplace, especially amongst senior people in the Russian oil and gas industry. However, many of these deaths may be score-settling amongst the highly criminalised elites rather than state killing, a throwback to the ‘wild west’ capitalism of the 1990s. ‘Suicide by window’ has risks akin to shooting; you need to be on familiar ground, know where CCTV is, etc.

Other forms of assassination are more subtle. Since the 1960s, the KGB—now the FSB – worked on staged car crashes as forms of assassination, and rumours persist to this day that a leading Ukrainian opposition leader was killed in March 1999 in such an ‘accident’. If done well, it is almost impossible to prove. The inventor of this technique was KGB General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, who also allegedly invented aeroplane hijacking as a political weapon in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East.

But poisoning has emerged as the favoured assassination tool for Putin. Here are some possible reasons to explain the thinking.

First, poison is versatile. It can be very high profile or very low profile. It can leave no trace. There is a poison for every circumstance. Of the several dozen unexplained deaths in the UK and Europe of Putin opponents, how many were natural? We will probably never know. Sophisticated poisons are difficult to identify.

Poison can also take time to kick in. You do not need to be at the scene when it kicks in.

Poisoning can also be public and send a dramatic message, a theatrical act that grabs the imagination of the world, such as Litvinenko’s, whose body collapsed slowly and painfully over several weeks as Britain and much of the world watched.

So poison – and assassination more broadly – induces not only death but also fear and a message. It is a psychological tool aimed not only at Russian targets but also others too. Belgium’s prime minister was recently threatened with consequences that would last “for eternity” if he touched Russian state assets held in the Euroclear financial depository in Brussels. If that is not a threat to kill, I don’t know what is.

Until now, Russian poisoners – there is one FSB unit and one GRU unit that do this work – have deployed three main types: opioids, used for example in the October 2002 Dubrovka Theatre siege in Moscow where some 130 hostages died along with the hostage-takers. Second, radioactive poisons, of which Litvinenko’s murder was the most infamous, although the poison may have been tested on a live subject, imprisoned Chechen separatist leader Lecha Islamov, in 2004. Third, dioxins: for example, Viktor Yushchenko, the anti-Moscow Ukrainian presidential candidate, was poisoned using a dioxin in late 2004. He survived, but his face bears the pockmarked scars to this day.

Turning back to Navalny’s murder, it was, for Putin, highly personal. Navalny was not just a regime critic, whose corruption investigations embarrassed Putin’s inner circle. He was an emblem of a different future for Russia, more Western, more law-governed compared with Putin’s regime combining an all-powerful secret police and highly violent and ruthless organised crime. In murdering Navaly, Putin killed a man and an alternative future for Russia.

Like Ivan the Terrible or Vlad the Impaler, Putin sometimes kills his enemies in very memorable ways: a comment on his state of mind and his way of governing; murder and fear, and Navalny’s murder was an event which Putin wanted to mark.

Did Putin want the means of death advertised? Perhaps he wanted Navalny’s dart frog death to be for his private enjoyment? But if he did expect that the truth would emerge from the depths of the Polar Wolf Penal Colony, the message was similar to that sent with the killing of Litvinenko; if you oppose the Putin regime, think about every door handle you touch, every letter you pick up, and every drink you accept.

And by murdering someone already in prison, Putin added an extra twist, summed up in a Russian proverb; beat your own, so that others fear you. His message: if this is how I treat my own, just think how I will treat you.