Alexander Litvinenko

Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko was a fugitive officer of the Russian FSB secret service who specialized in tacklingorganized crime.

In November 1998, Litvinenko and several other FSB officers publicly accused their superiors of ordering the assassination of the Russian tycoon and oligarch Boris Berezovsky.

Litvinenko was arrested the following March on charges of exceeding the authority of his position. He was acquitted in November 1999 but re-arrested before the charges were again dismissed in 2000. He fled with his family to London and was granted asylum in the United Kingdom, where he worked as a journalist, writer and consultant for the British intelligence services.

During his time in London, Litvinenko wrote two books, Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within and Lubyanka Criminal Group, wherein he accused the Russian secret services of staging the Russian apartment bombings and other terrorism acts in an effort to bring Vladimir Putin to power. He also accused Putin of ordering the murder in October 2006 of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

On 1 November 2006, Litvinenko suddenly fell ill and was hospitalised in what was established as a case of poisoning by radioactivepolonium-210 which resulted in his death on 23 November. The events leading up to this are a matter of controversy, spawning numerous theories relating to his poisoning and death.

A British murder investigation pointed to Andrey Lugovoy, a member of Russia's Federal Protective Service, as the prime suspect. The United Kingdom requested the extradition of Lugovoy, but Russia refused leading to the cooling of relations between Russia and the United Kingdom. Britain demanded that Lugovoy be extradited, which is against the Constitution of Russia directly prohibiting extradition of Russian citizens, and without handing Russia any evidence related to the case. Russia denied the extradition. Lugovoy passed a lie detector test in Russia, denying the accusations.

After Litvinenko's death, his widow, Marina, pursued a vigorous campaign on behalf of her husband through the Litvinenko Justice Foundation. In October 2011, she won the right for an inquest into her husband's death to be conducted by a coroner in London; however the inquest has been repeatedly set back by issues relating to examinable evidence.[8]

Alexander Litvinenko was born in the Russian city of Voronezh in 1962.

After he graduated from a Nalchik secondary school in 1980 he was drafted into the Internal Troops of theMinistry of Internal Affairs as a Private. After a year of service, he matriculated in the Kirov Higher Command School in Vladikavkaz.

In 1981, Litvinenko married Nataliya, an accountant, with whom he had a son, Alexander, and a daughter, Sonia.

This marriage ended in divorce in 1994 and in the same year Litvinenko married Marina, a ballroom dancer and fitness instructor, with whom he had a son, Anatoly.

After graduation in 1985, Litvinenko became a platoon commander in the Dzerzhinsky Division of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs. He was assigned to the 4th Company, where among his duties was the protection of valuable cargo while in transit.

In 1986 he became an informant when he was recruited by the MVD's KGB counterintelligence section and in 1988 he was officially transferred to the Third Chief Directorate of the KGB, Military Counter Intelligence.

Later that year, after studying for a year at the Novosibirsk Military Counter Intelligence School, he became an operational officer and served in KGB military counterintelligence until 1991.

In 1991, Litvinenko was promoted to the Central Staff of the Federal Counterintelligence Service, specialising in counter-terrorist activities and infiltration of organised crime. He was awarded the title of "MUR veteran" for operations conducted with the Moscow criminal investigation department, the MUR.

Litvinenko also saw active military service in many of the so-called "hot spots" of the former USSR and Russia.

During the First Chechen War Litvinenko planted several FSB agents in Chechnya. Although he was often called a "Russianspy" by western press, throughout his career he was not an 'intelligence agent' and did not deal with secrets beyond information on operations against organised criminal groups.

Litvinenko met Boris Berezovsky in 1994 when he took part in investigations into an assassination attempt on the oligarch. He later began to moonlight for Berezovsky and was responsible for the oligarch's security.

Litvinenko's employment under Berezovsky and other security services personnel was illegal, but the state somewhat tolerated it in order to retain staff who were at the time underpaid.

Thus, Litvinenko's employment for the controversial businessman and others was not investigated. Often such inquiries in Russia were selective and targeted only at those who had stepped out of line.

In 1997, Litvinenko was promoted to the FSB Directorate of Analysis and Suppression of Criminal Groups, with the title of senior operational officer and deputy head of the Seventh Section.

According to Dimitri Simes, the Directorate was viewed as much as a part of organised crime as it was of law enforcement.

According to Litvinenko's widow, Marina, while her husband was employed in the FSB he discovered numerous links among members of the top brass of Russian law enforcement agencies and Russian mafia groups, such as the Solntsevo gang. Berezovsky arranged a meeting for him with the Director of the FSB, Mikhail Barsukov, and the Deputy Director of Internal affairs, Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov, to discuss the alleged corruption problems, with no result. This led him to the conclusion that the entire system was corrupt.

In December 1997 Litvinenko claimed he received an order to kill Berezovsky. He did not inform his part-time employer until 20 March 1998.

According to his widow, on 25 July 1998, the day on which Vladimir Putin replaced Nikolay Kovalyov as the Director of the Federal Security Service, Berezovsky introduced Litvinenko to Putin. Berezovsky claimed that he had helped Putin to take the Director's position.[23] According to his widow, Litvinenko reported to Putin on corruption in the FSB, but Putin was unimpressed.

According to Litvinenko, Putin was involved with a corrupt military general in the Russian army when Putin was a Deputy for Economic Affairs to the Mayor of St. Petersburg. Litvenenko was doing an investigation into the general and Uzbek drug barons and believed that Putin tried to stall the investigation in order to save his reputation.

On 13 November 1998, Berezovsky wrote an open letter to Putin in Kommersant. He accused heads of the Directorate of Analysis and Suppression of Criminal Groups Major-General Yevgeny Khokholkov, N. Stepanov, A. Kamyshnikov, N. Yenin of ordering his assassination.

Four days later Litvinenko and four other officers appeared together in a press conference at the Russian news agency Interfax. All officers worked for both FSB in the Directorate of Analysis and Suppression of Criminal Groups and for Boris Berezovsky.[11] They repeated the allegation made by Berezovsky.

The officers also claimed they were ordered to kill Mikhail Trepashkin who was also present at the press conference, and to kidnap a brother of the businessman Umar Dzhabrailov.

In 2007, Sergey Dorenko provided The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal with a complete copy of an interview he conducted in April 1998 for ORT, a television station, with Litvinenko and his fellow employees. The interview, of which only excerpts were shown in 1998, shows the FSB officers, who were disguised in masks or dark glasses, claim that their bosses had ordered them to kill, kidnap or frame prominent Russian politicians and businesspeople.

Jim Heintz of the Associated Press opined that although Berezovsky does not appear in the interview, he has an omnipresence in it, given that the officers worked for him, and the interview was taped by Dorenko, a Russian journalist who was an employee of ORT owned in part by Berezovsky.

After holding the press conference, Litvinenko was dismissed from the FSB. Later, in an interview with Yelena Tregubova, Putin said that he personally ordered the dismissal of Litvinenko, stating, "I fired Litvinenko and disbanded his unit ...because FSB officers should not stage press conferences. This is not their job. And they should not make internal scandals public."

Litvinenko also believed that Putin was behind his arrest. He said, "Putin had the power to decide whether to pass my file to the prosecutors or not. He always hated me. And there was a bonus for him: by throwing me to the wolves he distanced himself from Boris [Berezovsky] in the eyes of FSB's generals."

In October 2000, in violation of an order not to leave Moscow, Litvinenko and his family travelled to Turkey, possibly via Ukraine.

While in Turkey, Litvinenko applied for asylum at the United States Embassy in Ankara, but his application was denied.

Henry Plater-Zyberk opined that the denial may have been based on possible American opinions that Litvinenko's knowledge was of little benefit and that he might create problems.

With the help of Alexander Goldfarb, Litvinenko bought air tickets for the Istanbul-London-Moscow flight, and asked for political asylum at Heathrow Airport during the transit stop on 1 November 2000.

Political asylum was granted on 14 May 2001, not because of his knowledge on intelligence matters, but rather on humanitarian grounds. While in London he became a journalist for the separatist Chechenpress and a controversial author. He also joined Berezovsky in campaigning against Putin's government. In October 2006 he became a naturalised British citizen with residence in Whitehaven.

On 27 October 2007, the Daily Mail, citing "diplomatic and intelligence sources," stated that Mr Litvinenko was paid about £2,000 per month by MI6 at the time of his murder. John Scarlett, the head of MI6 (who was once based in Moscow), was allegedly personally involved in recruiting him.

The Independent stated that whilst cooperation of Litvinenko with MI6 will likely never be confirmed, an MI6 retainer for Litvinenko suggests systematic cooperation, because MI6 usually makes irregular payments to exiles in exchange for information.

Litvinenko's widow, Marina Litvinenko, has admitted that her husband co-operated with the British MI6 and MI5, working as a consultant and helping the agencies to combat Russian organized crime in Europe.

In February 2012, Litvinenko's father, Valter, apologized for what he called his personal "slander campaign" against the Russian government. Before the confession by Marina Litvinenko, he had publicly blamed the Russian security services for his son's death. In an interview Valter Litvinenko said that if he had known at the time that his son was a British intelligence agent, he would not have made such accusations.

 

Mikhail Trepashkin, a former FSB officer, stated that in 2002 he had warned Litvinenko that an FSB unit was assigned to assassinate him. In spite of this, Litvinenko often travelled overseas with no security arrangements, and freely mingled with the Russian community in the United Kingdom, and often received journalists at his home.

In January 2007, the Polish newspaper Dziennik revealed that a target with a photo of Litvinenko on it was used for shooting practice by the Vityaz Training Centre in Balashikha in October 2002.

The centre, run by Sergey Lyusyuk, is not affiliated with the government, and trains bodyguards, debt collectors and private security forces, although in November 2006 the centre was used by the Vityaz for a qualification examination due to their own centre being under renovation.

The targets, which Lyusyuk says were bought in the Olympic Market, were also photographed when the chairman of the Federation Council of Russia Sergei Mironov visited the centre and met Lyusyuk on 7 November 2006.

When asked why the photographs of Mironov's visit were removed from the centre's website Lyusyuk stated, "(T)hose Poles are up to something" and added that Mironov didn't see the targets and knew nothing about them.

A series of newspaper articles by Julia Svetlichnaja and James Heartfield based on interviews that they had conducted with Litvinenko were published, beginning 27 hours after Litvinenko’s death with an article in the Daily Telegraph. Eight days later The Observer published an article in which Svetlichnaja alleged that Litvinenko said he was planning to “blackmail or sell sensitive information about all kinds of powerful people, including oligarchs, corrupt officials and sources in the Kremlin”. She said. “He mentioned a figure of£10,000 that they would pay each time to stop him broadcasting these FSB documents”.

Heartfield was a researcher and writer and Svetlichnaja a researcher in political theory and aesthetics, both at the University of Westminster. Neither has published any material on Chechnya, which was the stated reason for the interviews, or written on Litvinenko before his death or after the series of articles and press conference following his death. Furthermore they have been unable to provide any written or recorded evidence to substantiate their claims.

In 2002 Litvinenko was convicted in absentia in Russia and given a three and a half year jail sentence for charges of corruption.

Litvinenko regularly told people about his theories relating to the power structures in Russia, and would bombard his contacts with information relating to his theories.

In a report for the Conflict Studies Research Centre, Henry Plater-Zyberk, a lecturer at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom and Russian politics expert, described Litvinenko as a one-man disinformation bureau, who was at first guided by Berezovsky but later in possible pursuit of attention for himself. Plater-Zyberk notes that Litvinenko made numerous accusations without presenting any evidence to give credence to his claims, and these claims which became increasingly outlandish were often accepted by the British media without question.

According to Michael Mainville, Litvinenko knew the secret to a conspiracy theory is that they are based upon an absence of proof, and that the more outlandish the claim, the harder it is to disprove.[48] This has led to some political analysts dismissing his claims as those of a fantasist.

Litvinenko accused the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General-Staff of the Russian armed forces of having organised the 1999 Armenian parliament shooting that killed thePrime Minister of Armenia, Vazgen Sargsyan, and seven members of parliament, ostensibly to derail the peace process which would have resolved the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, but he offered no evidence to support the accusation.

The Russian embassy in Armenia denied any such involvement, and described Litvinenko's accusation as an attempt to harm relations between Armenia and Russia by people against the democratic reforms in Russia.

Litvinenko alleged that agents from the FSB coordinated the 1999 Russian apartment bombings that killed more than 300 people, whereas Russian officials blamed the explosions on Islamic terrorists. This version of events was suggested earlier by David Satter.

In a 2003 interview with the Australian SBS TV network, and aired on Dateline, Litvinenko claimed that two of the Chechen terrorists involved in the 2002 Moscow theatre siege—whom he named "Abdul the Bloody" and "Abu Bakar"—were working for the FSB, and that the agency manipulated the rebels into staging the attack.

Litvinenko said, "[W]hen they tried to find [Abdul the Bloody and Abu Bakar] among the dead terrorists, they weren't there. The FSB got its agents out. So the FSB agents among Chechens organized the whole thing on FSB orders, and those agents were released." This echoed similar claims made by Mikhail Trepashkin.[54] The leading role of an FSB agent, Khanpasha Terkibaev ("Abu Bakar"), was also described by Anna Politkovskaya, Ivan Rybkin and Alexander Khinshtein.

In the beginning of April 2003 Litvinenko gave "the Terkibaev file" to Sergei Yushenkov when he visited London, who in turn passed it to Anna Politkovskaya.[28] A few days later Yushenkov was assassinated. Terkibaev was later killed in Chechnya. According to Ivan Rybkin, a speaker of the Russian State Duma, "The authorities failed to keep [the FSB agent] Terkibaev out of public view, and that is why he was killed. I know how angry people were, because they knew Terkibaev had authorization from presidential administration."

Alexander Litvinenko suggested in September 2004 that the Russian secret services must have been aware of the plot beforehand, and therefore that they must have themselves organized the attack as a false flag operation. He spoke in an interview before his death with Chechenpress news agency, and said that because the hostage takers had previously been in FSB custody for committing terrorist attacks, it is inconceivable that they would have been released and still been able to carry out attacks independently. He said that they would only have been freed if they were of use to the FSB, and that even in the case that they were freed without being turned into FSB assets, they would be under a strict surveillance regime that would not have allowed them to carry out the Beslan attack unnoticed.

Ella Kesayeva, co-chair of the group Voice of Beslan, formalized Litvinenko's argument in a November 2008 article in Novaya Gazeta, noting the large number of hostage takers who were in government custody not long before attacking the school, and coming to the same conclusion that Beslan was a false flag attack.

Litvinenko stated that "all the bloodiest terrorists of the world" were connected to FSB-KGB, including Carlos "The Jackal" Ramírez, Yassir Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Abdullah Öcalan,Wadie Haddad of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, George Hawi who led the Communist Party of Lebanon, Ezekias Papaioannou from Cyprus, Sean Garland from Ireland, and many others. He said that all of them were trained, funded, and provided with weapons, explosives and counterfeit documents in order to carry out terrorist attacks worldwide and that each act of terrorism made by these people was carried out according to the task and under the rigid control of the KGB of the USSR.

Litvinenko said that "the center of global terrorism is not in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or the Chechen Republic. The terrorism infection creeps away worldwide from the cabinets of the Lubyanka Square and the Kremlin".

In a July 2005 interview with the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita, Litvinenko alleged that Ayman al-Zawahiri, a prominent leader of al-Qaeda, was trained for half a year by the FSB in Dagestan in 1997 and called him "an old agent of the FSB".

Litvinenko said that after this training, al-Zawahiri "was transferred to Afghanistan, where he had never been before and where, following the recommendation of his Lubyanka chiefs, he at once ... penetrated the milieu of Osama bin Laden and soon became his assistant in Al Qaeda."[66]Konstantin Preobrazhenskiy, a former KGB officer and writer, supported this claim and said that Litvinenko "was responsible for securing the secrecy of Al-Zawahiri's arrival in Russia; he was trained by FSB instructors in Dagestan, Northern Caucasus, in 1996–1997." He said: "At that time, Litvinenko was the Head of the Subdivision for Internationally Wanted Terrorists of the First Department of the Operative-Inquiry Directorate of the FSB Anti-Terrorist Department.

He was ordered to undertake the delicate mission of securing Al-Zawahiri from unintentional disclosure by the Russian police. Though Al-Zawahiri had been brought to Russia by the FSB using a false passport, it was still possible for the police to learn about his arrival and report to Moscow for verification. Such a process could disclose Al-Zawahiri as an FSB collaborator. In order to prevent this, Litvinenko visited a group of highly placed police officers to notify them in advance." According to Sergei Ignatchenko, an FSB spokesman, al-Zawahiri was arrested by Russian authorities in Dagestan in December 1996 and released in May 1997.

When asked in an interview who he thought the originator of the 2005 bombings in London was, Litvinenko responded saying,[62] "You know, I have spoken about it earlier and I shall say now, that I know only one organization, which has made terrorism the main tool of solving of political problems. It is the Russian special services."

According to Litvinenko, the 2005 controversy over the publication in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten of editorial cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad was orchestrated by the FSB to punish Denmark for its refusal to extradite Chechen separatists.

Two weeks before his poisoning, Alexander Litvinenko accused Vladimir Putin of ordering the assassination of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya and stated that a former presidential candidate, Irina Hakamada, warned Politkovskaya about threats to her life coming from the Russian president. Litvinenko advised Politkovskaya to escape from Russia immediately. Hakamada denied her involvement in passing any specific threats, and said that she warned Politkovskaya only in general terms more than a year ago.[69] It remains unclear if Litvinenko referred to an earlier statement made by Boris Berezovsky, who claimed that Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian Deputy Prime Minister, received word from Hakamada that Putin threatened her and like-minded colleagues in person. According to Berezovsky, Putin uttered that Hakamada and her colleagues "will take in the head immediately, literally, not figuratively" if they "open the mouth" about the Russian apartment bombings.

According to Litvinenko, the FSB deputy chief General Anatoly Trofimov said to him, "Don’t go to Italy, there are many KGB agents among the politicians. Romano Prodi is our man there,"meaning Romano Prodi, the Italian centre-left leader, former Prime Minister of Italy and former President of the European Commission. The conversation with Trofimov took place in 2000, after the Prodi-KGB scandal broke out in October 1999 due to information about Prodi provided by Vasili Mitrokhin.

In April 2006, a British Member of the European Parliament for London, Gerard Batten of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), demanded an inquiry into the allegations.

According to the Brussels-based newspaper The EU Reporter on 3 April 2006, "Another high-level source, a former KGB operative in London, has confirmed the story."

On 26 April 2006, Batten repeated his call for a parliamentary inquiry, revealing that "former senior members of the KGB are willing to testify in such an investigation, under the right conditions." He added, "It is not acceptable that this situation is unresolved, given the importance of Russia's relations with the European Union."[74] On 22 January 2007, theBBC and ITV News released documents and video footage from February 2006, in which Litvinenko repeated his statements about Prodi.

A report by the Conflict Studies Research Centre of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom from May 2007 noted that Trofimov was never the head of the FSB, which did not oversee intelligence operations, had never worked in the intelligence directorate of the KGB or its successor the SVR, nor had he worked in the counterintelligence department of the intelligence services, nor had he ever worked in Italy, making it difficult to understand how Trofimov would have had knowledge about such a recruitment. Henry Plater-Zyberk, the co-author of the report, suggested that Trofimov was "conveniently dead," so "could neither confirm nor deny the story," and noted Litvinenko's history of making accusations without evidence to back them up.

Shortly before his death Litvinenko tipped off Spanish authorities on several organised crime bosses with links to Spain. During a meeting in May 2006 he allegedly provided security officials with information on the locations, roles, and activities of several "Russian" mafia figures with ties to Spain, including Izguilov, Zahkar Kalashov, and Tariel Oniani.

In his book Gang from Lubyanka, Litvinenko alleged that Vladimir Putin during his time at the FSB was personally involved in protecting the drug trafficking from Afghanistan organized by Abdul Rashid Dostum. In December 2003 Russian authorities confiscated over 4000 copies of the book.

Litvinenko commented on a new law that "Russia has the right to carry out preemptive strikes on militant bases abroad" and explained that these "preemptive strikes may involve anything except nuclear weapons." Litvinenko said, "You know who they mean when they say 'terrorist bases abroad'? They mean us, Zakayev and Boris and me."

He also said that "It was considered in our service that poison is an easier weapon than a pistol." He referred to a secret laboratory in Moscow that still continues development of deadly poisons, according to him.

In an article written by Litvinenko in July 2006, and published online on Zakayev's Chechenpress website, he claimed that Vladimir Putin is a paedophile.

Litvinenko also claimed that Anatoly Trofimov and Artyom Borovik knew of the alleged paedophilia.

The claims have been called "wild" and "sensational and unsubstantiated" in the British media. Litvinenko made the allegation after Putin kissed a boy on his belly while stopping to chat with some tourists during a walk in the Kremlin grounds on 28 June 2006.

The incident was recalled in a webcast organised by the BBC and Yandex, in which over 11,000 people asked Putin to explain the act, to which he responded, "He seemed very independent and serious... I wanted to cuddle him like a kitten and it came out in this gesture. He seemed so nice. ... There is nothing behind it."

It has been suggested that the incident was a "clumsy attempt" to soften Putin's image in the lead-up to the 32nd G8 Summit which was held in Saint Petersburg in July 2006.[83]

On 1 November 2006, Litvinenko suddenly fell ill and was hospitalised. His illness was later attributed to poisoning with radionuclidepolonium-210 after the Health Protection Agency found significant amounts of the rare and highly toxic element in his body. However, the London coroner's inquest is yet to be completed.[why?] Media claims of polonium poisoning, therefore, lack official substantiation.

In interviews, Litvinenko stated that he met with two former KGB agents early on the day he fell ill – Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoy. Though both denied any wrongdoing, a leaked US diplomatic cable revealed that Kovtun had left polonium traces in the house and car he had used in Hamburg. The men also introduced Litvinenko to a tall, thin man of central Asian appearance called 'Vladislav Sokolenko' who Lugovoy said was a business partner. Lugovoy is also a former bodyguard of Russian ex-Acting Prime minister Yegor Gaidar (who also suffered from a mysterious illness in November 2006). Later, Litvinenko had lunch at Itsu, a sushi restaurant in Piccadilly in London, with an Italian acquaintance and nuclear waste expert, Mario Scaramella, to whom he made the allegations regarding Italy's Prime Minister Romano Prodi. Scaramella, attached to the Mitrokhin Commission investigating KGB penetration of Italian politics, claimed to have information on the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, 48, a journalist who was killed at her Moscow apartment in October 2006. In Litvinenko's last known public statement, he indicated that he believed it was Scaramella who poisoned him.

Marina Litvinenko, widow of the deceased, accused Moscow of orchestrating the murder. Though she believes the order did not come from Putin himself, she does believe it was done at the behest of the authorities, and announced that she will refuse to provide evidence to any Russian investigation out of fear that it would be misused or misrepresented.[91]

Shortly after Litvinenko's death one of Litvinenko's associates, Akhmed Zakayev, Foreign Minister of Chechen government-in-exile who lived next door to Mr Litvinenko, announced that Litvinenko had accepted Islam the day before his death. His father confirmed the reports and professed his son had been thinking about converting to Islam for a long time. As the coffin was lowered into the grave in Highgate cemetery, the funeral was conducted by an Imam invited by Zakayev who performed the burial according to Islamic rites. Litvinenko's wife, Marina, by contrast had wanted a non-denominational service at the grave.

The funeral ceremony was followed by a private memorial at which the ensemble Tonus Peregrinus sang sacred music by Russian composers Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Rachmaninov,Victor Kalinnikov, and three works by British composer Antony Pitts.

On 22 November Litvinenko's medical staff at University College Hospital reported he had suffered a "major setback" due to either heart failure or an overnight heart attack. He died on 23 November. Scotland Yard stated that inquiries into the circumstances of how Litvinenko became ill would continue.

On 24 November a posthumous statement was released, in which Litvinenko directly accused Vladimir Putin of poisoning him. Litvinenko's friend Alex Goldfarb, who is also the chairman of Boris Berezovsky's Civil Liberties Fund, claimed Litvinenko had dictated it to him three days earlier. Andrei Nekrasov said his friend Litvinenko and Litvinenko's lawyer composed the statement in Russian on 21 November and translated it to English.

Putin disputed the authenticity of this note while attending a Russia-EU summit in Helsinki and claimed it was being used for political purposes.[95][96] William Dunkerley, in a briefing from May 2007 for a round table which discussed Litvinenko's case and the way it was handled by the Russian and Western media, called into question the authenticity of the statement, noting that the statement did not read like a statement made on one's deathbed and was typed in English, a language which Litvinenko was far from proficient in, with the signature and date handwritten.[34] Goldfarb later stated that Litvinenko instructed him to write a note "in good English" in which Putin was to be accused of his poisoning. Goldfarb also stated that he read the note to Litvinenko in English and Russian, to which he claims Litvinenko agreed "with every word of it" and signed it.[97][98] Thus, there are three conflicting media claims regarding who authored Litvinenko's deathbed statement: (1) it was dictated by Litvinenko himself, (2) it was composed by Litvinenko's lawyer, and (3) it was written by Alexander Goldfarb.