Aleksander Litvinenko and Tsar Vladimir

A few people who've discussed the poisoning death of Aleksander Litvinenko contain the view that since no shred of tangible evidence ... no smoking gun or trail of blood ... results in the Kremlin door, any insinuation fond of Vladimir Putin is exceeding expectations or paranoid at worst.
While I would refrain from joining the “he dun it” chorus, enough circumstantial pandora jewelry collateral has accrued since Putin took capacity to make suspicions very far from mere supposition. There's actually very good reason to suspect the hand of the Kremlin in several of these bizarre deaths - by “hand” I’m not inferring direct action incidentally, as with 'hi this is Putin, go whack L!'. A wink or a nod may be everything was required to set *** use of, while leaving no track-back to the occupant better office. And also the head which was nodded didn’t necessarily need to be Putin’s. There may well have been four, five as well as six heads nodding down the road, before Sergei Poloniumevski put on his black leather jacket and called his friend the chemist. But to argue without nuance that Putin is off-the-hook - a victim of ill-placed suspicion in the deaths of regime opponents in the last couple of years, would be to risk coming off as extremely ***. There might a 1,000 to at least one chance that he is pure as riven snow, but I'll save my money for that horse races.
In a post beneath I touched on what we should do know about Tsar Vlad. We know he's muzzled the press. We also know he has made sweeping legislative changes aimed toward centralizing power in the Kremlin (although some of this may indeed happen to be forced on him by circumstances). We all know he used pandora beads underhanded tactics and a dodgy court to nail Yukos along with other players towards the wall. We know he dislikes foreign NGO’s and seems to sense danger by any organization within his domain he can’t control. Becoming an ex-KGB Lt Colonel, he doubtless feels uneasy about potential spies functioning underneath the cover of foreign operations, and doubtless the person has very good reason to feel concerned. I completely empathize.
The psychological profile that emerges from all we do learn about Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, isn't one which inspires confidence with regards to democratic behaviors for example freedom of speech, including the right to air dirty laundry in public. Vlad is not cool, despite his elfin features and boy scout smile. He keeps his friends close and the enemies closer, in ways they might prefer he didn't. His rise to power effectively places a KGB-derived culture and mentality in the saddle. Together with which comes all the fun and games this option are past masters at playing. Anyone who imagines that a wolf can morph into a sheep by play-acting at democracy, must look more closely at what's been moving in Russia in the last couple of years. It’s clear Putin still holds old allegiances and old ambitions, which have merely been re-modeled to meet current challenges and opportunities. He also offers oil which can give a guy a 007 complex, including the license that complements the number.
Obviously none of the makes him directly responsible for the killing of Litvinenko. I am certain a lot happens in the name from the Russian state, many bumps at night, that Putin knows little about. Even in the situation of murdered dissidents, businessmen and journalists, it is stretching it to think that Putin was directly involved. Why implicate himself in matters that look after themselves in the grand old Kremlin style? Institutional disapproval toward people who fall foul of the golden boy's good graces, coupled with an in-built climate of permission, might lead to things pandoras happening. Performs this imply that Putin all the time looks after a sanitized distance from murky goings on? Again we do not know, but my hunch may not be. But if you are head honcho of a huge system that does actually keep some pretty shady customers about the pay roll, and you're pandora bracelets simply viewed by many as the shining symbol of the new Russia, a tweak of the pinky is possibly all that is required for funny stuff to occur.
The expatriate Russian community can't be eliminated when it comes to UK incidents. Given Putin's efforts to establish working relations, it might not be in his interests to rock the boat with something so sensational like a high profile poisoning. There has been whisperings about Russian oligarch-in-exile, Boris Berezovsky. But Litvinenko from what we should know were built with a long-standing relationship with Berezovsky, without any published reports associated with a rift.