I think the eXile article by Kirill Pankratov I posted yesterday sums things up pretty nicely. Basically you have a cop with some connections to the FSB (not a "spy") who becomes an asset of the Mafia kingpin Berezovsky who is in exile in London. Berezovsky really wants to get back into power, so he's been engaging in an anti-Russian PR campaign for the past 6 years or so. The ex-cop (Litvinenko) spins himself as an insider and works for Berezovsky spinning wild tales about the evil Russian regime nobody listens to. Then the ex-cop gets poisoned by an exceedingly weird substance. All else is speculation.
My original guess was that Berezovsky killed up to damage Putin and make his own extradition back to Russia impossible or very difficult. But that would be risky. Now I'm leaning more toward some kind of mafia hit, since we know that L. had connections in that world. But I'm really in the dark.
--- Jim Straub <rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm dumb. Can someone on this list explain to this
> layperson (maybe
> slightly sub-lay) what's the deal with the russian
> guy who got poisoned? I
> scroll through a lot of cryptic debates about
> russian politics and society,
> so can someone explain to me who knows nothing about
> russia, who got
> poisoned and by who and why?
>
> Because otherwise I'm going to continue to daydream
> that it's part of a
> larger plot by an evil mastermind to procure some
> sort of massive ray gun,
> that he will use to hold the earth ransom, only to
> be foiled by this
> Litvenko character, or something. The mastermind
> has a gardener who kills
> people by secreeting radiation into them. Y'know.
> > ___________________________________
>
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