In a December 6th installment of his column ???????Subjective Evaluation??????? for National Interest, Russia scholar Dmitri Simes of the Nixon Center purports to critique ???????highly simplistic and sometimes even misleading coverage??????? of the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. Simes argues that although Litvinenko was an employee of the FSB (successor to the KGB) is not appropriate to call him a ???????spy??????? since he never served in a ???????foreign intelligence??????? position but rather was assigned to handle organized crime issues and in that capacity made contact with exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He also argues that it is not appropriate to refer to Berezovsky as merely ???????opposed??????? to the rule of Vladimir Putin since ???????he has said on several occasions that he is actively pursuing regime change in Russia using his base in London and his business and political contacts from Ukraine to Georgia.???????

Simes then concludes that, nonetheless, it is unlikely Berezovsky had Litvinenko killed because he has failed to make a serious effort to exploit the killing as a means of destabilizing the Putin regime and because of the ???????terrible personal risk??????? that he would be taking in initiating such a plot. Further evidence that this is so comes from Robert Amsterdam, Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s attorney, who has announced that the Kremlin may now be seeking to blame Litvinenko’s killing not on Berezovsky but on his client, now jailed in Siberia, even as it seeks to put him on trial for a new set of charges pertaining to his operation of the YUKOS oil concern.

Simes also dismisses the idea that the Kremlin would have moved against Litvinenko simply because of his public criticism of the Kremlin as part of Berezovsky????????s camp, and insists that the Kremlin is not capable of acting irrationally. He believes that the risks involved to the Kremlin would outweigh the threat posed by Litvinenko in that case, stating: ???????Killing a fairly insignificant political opponent in a key European capital with a highly traceable material would demonstrate an appalling lack of judgment.??????? However, Simes states that if Litvinenko was directly involved in giving support to the Chechen rebels, this might well explain such an action by the Kremlin. Simes writes:

It is clear that Litvinenko was quite close to at least some Chechen rebels, like exiled separatist spokesman Akhmed Zakayev, whom he saw on November 1, the day he was reportedly poisoned. If Litvinenko had been actively involved with Chechen insurgents, Moscow????????s calculations could have been quite different. After all, it is widely believed, and even privately admitted in Moscow government circles, that the Kremlin authorized the killing of former Chechen president Zelimkhan Yandarbiev in 2004. And the Duma recently passed a law authorizing the assassination of suspected terrorists outside Russian borders. So, before dismissing the Kremlin connection, it is essential to establish what exactly Mr. Litvinenko????????a recent convert to Islam????????was involved in and to examine any involvement he could have had with Islamic extremist organizations that might be interested in polonium-210 for dirty bombs or other uses.

In a January 1 post, blogger Mike Woodson at TPM Caf???? takes issue with Simes???????? rejection of theories other than a Chechen connection as a basis for a possible Kremlin motive. Woodson argues that Islamic extremism does not pose the same sort of common enemy for Russia and the U.S. that Hitler did, and that therefore there is no basis to ???????gloss over??????? outrages committed by today????????s Russia in the way that Stalin????????s transgressions were ignored for the sake of unity. He might also have mentioned that today????????s decimated Russia presents nothing like the sort of powerful ally or enemy scenario as was presented by the USSR, meaning we have far less reason to hesitate in taking necessary action.

Woodson writes:

The very argument, echoed by Prof. Simes and others, that it would be illogically risky for Mr. Putin to approve of the use of Polonium-210 against Litvinenko in the U.K. is what increases the likelihood that he could get away with it. As such, the argument defeats itself. It also overlooks something about today’s cadre of KGB veterans ruling Russia: they survived the gangster wars of the 90’s not by chess-like calculation alone, but by brutality and risk-taking.

He then points out that

According to the December 31st Sunday Times report, Moscow prosecutors are investigating the similarities between the radiation poisoning death 2-years ago of Roman Tsepov, Vladimir V. Putin’s former contract bodyguard, and Alexander Litvinenko’s November 2006 murder. The Moscow Prosecutor General’s office stresses Tsepov’s intervention in Yukos business affairs after working for Putin when Putin was Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg. However, there is a problem with plausible deniability if two years ago Mr. Putin’s former bodyguard was murdered with Polonium-210 or another highly radioactive substance, dying like Mr. Litvinenko. It would have put the Russian Federation government on alert that its nuclear materials were not secure, and would make the 2006 theft of Polonium-210 without a Putin operative detecting it, highly unlikely. It also seems it would have led to a particularly aggressive all-agency investigation which would have resulted in the arrest of the assassin of Mr. Tsepov, and the conspirators.

And there are other precedents, including a general pattern of increasingly aggressive, neo-cold-war behavior by the Kremlin. Woodson writes:

According to an in-depth report by Neil Mackay of the Sunday Herald, an unnamed British counter-intelligence agent learned of a botched hit by a Russian intelligence operative on Judge Timothy Workman. The assassin shot Lt. Col. Robert Workman, an 83-year old British citizen who lived near Judge Workman. The Putin regime had been enraged by the denial of its requests to extradite both Boris Berezovsky and Chechan rebel Akhmed Zakayev from the United Kingdom, accusing the judge of “playing cold war politics.” Here is an earlier press report of that incident. No doubt the Kremlin will claim that it was framed yet again by the grand conspiracy (presumably in the entire West) to bring Putin down. Are we seeing a pattern of strikes on those deemed insignificant by the Kremlin, to send messages to those with whom it has directly tangled? Was Politkovskaya a message to Litvinenko? And then Litvinenko a message to Berezovsky and all other exiled former FSB/KGB? Additionally, the Putin regime’s refusal to allow extradition of Russian citizens suspected in murders on the UK’s soil seems to reveal a Cold War retaliatory policy. It seems aimed at intimidating the UK into cooperating with Putin’s assertion of control over London’s Russian emigre population. The implied threat: that a confrontation between the Kremlin by the UK could lead to retaliatory economic moves within Europe and on oil, gas and G8 commercial arrangements. One cannot ignore the evidence of Russian intelligence spying on US command areas leading up to the invasion of Iraq, or the assistance of Saddam Hussein’s regime in a way that could have ended in the death of American troops during the invasion. Some reports even suggested that it was Russian spetznaz that helped secret away so many of the Hussein munitions beyond the Syrian border that is being used to blow up 60 and 70 people at a time in Baghdad.

He adds that even if there were no precedent or rational motivation for Kremlin action against Litvinenko, it is more than capable of acting pursuant to pure paranoia:

The sort of animosity one would expect from one using Polonium-210 to send an excruciatingly painful message of horrific killing power and reach, would be from a person with much to lose by revelations from dossiers one is not sure exist, but which could politically destroy him. The level of paranoia possible in a country with tens of thousands of former secret service people and informants for hire should not be underestimated in its power to motivate pre-emptive assassination of someone known to be pursuing information or footage one is not sure exists. There is one back-burner motive to consider for Tsepov’s murder, and possibly Litvinenko’s. Many Western press outlets have joked about an incident caught on video in which Mr. Putin strokes, lifts the shirt of, and kisses a young boy’s stomach in public, later explaining it as the same as wanting to stroke a kitten. However, to a regime that has commandeered the leadership of a too-willing Moscow Patriarchate in nearly every aspect of government ministry to secure Russian popular support through the Church, the taped incident plus Alexander Litvinenko’s averred kompromat that Putin was known by his KGB superiors to have problems with underage boys, could destroy Putin’s public image on which both he and the Patriarch Alexei II have worked so hard to build. I don’t know if these allegations are true, but to utterly ignore them and the clip would seem to be negligent for the sake of avoiding taboo subjects. For the record, I sure hope the kompromat is false. It’s very creepy.

Creepy is putting it mildly. And what’s most creepy is not the Kremlin’s actions themselves, which should hardly be surprising given the identity of those Russians have chosen to govern them, but our own willingness to gape slack-jawed at those actions, allowing the nefarious forces at work within Russia now to consolidate their power, just as we allowed Stalin and Hitler to do so in the past. How comforting it is to think of media reports as ???????highly simplistic and sometimes even misleading??????? — both because we can feel ourselves superior and because we need not confront the reality of another Iron Curtain descending across the continent while a possibly irrational, tummy-kissing spy pulls the strings. But just like in the Wizard of Oz, when brought out from behind his Iron Curtain that spy is shown to be somewhat less than his intimidating illusion, and with a bit of basic practical work Dorothy is soon back in Kansas where she belongs. Will we get in our balloon, or keep staring at the big green face indefinitely?

Time will tell. In the end, it really makes no difference how we puzzle out the Litvinenko killing since, as Edward Luttwak writes in First Post:

The accusation that the former KGB/FSB secret policeman Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned by his former colleagues to stop his denunciations of President Putin is all too plausible. But there is really no need to speculate about the murder of Litvinenko – only one of several recent victims – to form an opinion of Vladimir Putin’s regime. The fact is that we are witnessing a return to Old Russia.

The evidence, which Luttwak reviews, and which Publius Pundit has been recording for months now, is there before our eyes. Russia is doomed to failure because it has utterly destroyed its reputation; even some Russians recognize this. In other words, Russia’s biggest problem is not really the outrageous conduct of its regime but the fact that no matter how bad the accusations against it might be, they always have the ring of truth. Russia, quite simply, can’t be trusted. The world is faced with the reality of pulling back the curtain to expose and dismantle this failure and then grapple with the consequences. The longer it waits, the bigger the task.

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia blog La Russophobe.