Orders to Kill by Amy Knight

Author:Amy Knight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Final Judgements

Far from being viewed as a criminal, Lugovoy was treated like a celebrity in Russia. In September 2007, LDRP leader Zhirinovsky announced at a press conference with much fanfare that Lugovoy would occupy the second position on his party’s ticket. Zhirinovsky may have been hoping that with Lugovoy on the ticket, the LDRP would gain some steam in its political campaign for the 2007 Duma elections. Interestingly, a U.S. embassy cable observed: “Throughout the press conference Lugovoy appeared uncomfortable in his new role as straight man for Zhirinovsky. It also appeared that he had been reprimanded by his new boss about the rank order in the party. Lugovoy pointedly retracted a statement of a day earlier that he had ambitions to run for president, coyly saying that every Russian would want to be the leader of such a great country, before gamely insisting that Zhirinovsky had the mettle to replace Putin.”43

Lugovoy has become a highly visible and wealthy member of the Duma, as well as a TV personality. (Kovtun has fared less well, and he and Lugovoy severed their relationship in 2009.) Lugovoy’s wife divorced him shortly after the episode with Litvinenko, not surprisingly, given that polonium had tainted their entire family because of his venture. He remarried a go-go dancer in 2013, with a lavish wedding on the Black Sea.44 According to Russian media reports, his new, very young and beautiful bride had no idea that her new husband was a suspect in the murder of Litvinenko when she married him.45

With financial help from Berezovsky, Litvinenko’s father, Valter, moved to Italy with his second wife to join his son Maxim (Litvinenko’s half-brother), who owned a restaurant on the Adriatic coast. Initially, Valter was convinced that Putin was behind the murder and said so publicly. But he gradually changed his mind and in early 2012 gave an interview to a Russian television station, sobbing, in which he apologized for blaming his son’s death on Russian authorities.46 Subsequently, he gave a deposition from Italy for Russian prosecutors in which he voiced the conviction that Boris Berezovsky (along with Alex Goldfarb) had killed his son: “It [his son’s murder] was a result of Berezovsky’s activity. It was him didn’t want Alexander, after coming back to Russia, to be able to tell somebody about what he had done and about his business in London. I believe that the polonium was used just to mislead everyone and that it was skillfully placed everywhere in London where Alexander was present.”47

Luke Harding visited the Litvinenko family in Italy in 2010. Both he and Goldfarb had the same explanation for Valter’s change of mind on his son’s murder. Valter and his family there (which by then included a daughter, her husband, and children) had fallen into dire financial straits because Maxim Litvinenko’s restaurant business had failed. Valter’s wife died in 2011 and he was grief-stricken, still not having gotten over his son’s murder. Also, Berezovsky had cut the family off financially, after initially being very generous in his support.

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