LANGUISHING in a bone-chilling gulag in the Arctic Circle, opposition leader Alexei Navalny bore no possible threat to tyrant Vladimir Putin.
Yet — riddled with dictators’ paranoia — many believe the Kremlin butcher ordered the democracy fighter’s death.
And, as with a spate of other state-sanctioned murders, Putin doesn’t give a damn who knows it.
From plane crashes to poisonings and a series of mystery falls from windows, the reach of his intelligence services is long and bloodthirsty.
With presidential elections next month, many think Putin ordered Navalny’s death as a perverted show of strength to enemies inside — and outside — Russia.
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US President Joe Biden said there was “no doubt” Putin was to blame for his killing.
Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya said her husband was poisoned because Putin “couldn’t break him”.
Whether Navalny was actually murdered last week or succumbed to years of savage mistreatment, the finger of suspicion points to Putin.
The Russian president had already broken Navalny’s health after his spies smeared nerve agent novichok in his underpants in 2020.
Caged on trumped-up charges, he had spent much of the past three years in solitary confinement, with bright lights left on at all times.
Opposition activist Sergei Biziukin said: “They killed him. Even if not on that very day, several years of torture is also a way of killing.”
Like some psychotic Mafia don, Putin likes to serve his revenge cold.
When deranged warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin and his mercenaries launched a mutiny last June, Putin waited two months before meting out a despot’s justice.
‘Stark warning’
A one-time Putin stooge, Prigozhin’s irregulars seized Rostov-on-Don and were bearing down on Moscow before a deal was brokered by Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko.
Putin called the coup a “betrayal”, “treason” and “a stab in the back”.
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In August, a private jet was ferrying Wagner Group chief Prigozhin and his lieutenants from Moscow to Saint Petersburg when it exploded at 28,000ft, killing all ten people on board.
Defence expert Professor Michael Clarke said Putin “was sending a stark warning to potential rebels and the country at large, ‘I’m the Mafia godfather, and don’t forget it’.”
Putin sent a message of sympathy to Prigozhin’s family. British financier and activist Bill Browder said it was straight out of The Godfather — “kill your enemies then express condolences”.
The Kremlin wasn’t always so nakedly brazen in ridding itself of those it considered enemies, leaving at least some plausible deniability.
In 2006 investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in a lift in her block of flats in Moscow. It was October 7 — Putin’s birthday.
An outspoken critic of Putin and of his regime’s human rights abuses in Chechnya, she had received death threats and was subject to an alleged poisoning before her murder.
In 2004 she had written that journalists in Russia now had to either publish independently on the internet or “it’s total servility to Putin”.
She added: “Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison or trial — whatever our special services, Putin’s guard dogs, see fit.”
Five men were later convicted of what was a contract killing. But whoever paid the £150,000 for the hit remains a “person unknown”.
Two years later, former KGB agent and defector Alexander Litvinenko became violently ill after drinking tea laced with polonium-210 at the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair, London.
Alexander had no doubt who was behind his murder — two former KGB assassins sent by Putin.
In hospital, he called detectives from his deathbed, saying: “I need to report a murder . . . mine.” Alexander, vomiting blood and pieces of his disintegrating stomach, died aged 43 three weeks later.
One associate, Andrei Nekrasov, revealed that just hours before he fell unconscious, Alexander told him: “The bastards got me — but they won’t get everybody.”
The day after Alexander’s death Putin sneered: “Mr Litvinenko is, unfortunately, not Lazarus.”
A British inquiry found that Russian agents had killed Litvinenko, “probably” with Putin’s approval. The Kremlin denied any involvement.
In March 2018 the deadly tentacles of Putin’s spy network reached Britain once more.
Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer, and daughter Yulia were found barely conscious on a bench in Salisbury, Wiltshire. Putin’s assassins had smeared novichok nerve agent on their front door handle.
The pair survived but, four months later, mother of three Dawn Sturgess, who lived in nearby Amesbury, died after she and partner Charlie Rowley found a fake perfume bottle containing the novichok.
Two Russian agents who it was later claimed were behind the poisonings ludicrously said they had come to Salisbury to see its cathedral “famous for its 123-metre spire”.
Putin described Skripal as “scum and a traitor to the motherland”.
Another Russian who had fled to the UK also died in circumstances his friends trace back to Moscow.
In 2013 the body of oligarch Boris Berezovsky was found on the bathroom floor of his home in Ascot, Berks. A scarf was round his neck and tied to the shower rail.
His friend Akhmed Zakayev said: “Nobody among those who knew Berezovsky thinks it was suicide.
“We all know the Russian secret service works on a world stage against Putin’s opponents and anyone who criticises his government. This death is part of a pattern.”
A coroner recorded an open verdict.
More suspicious deaths followed.
In 2015 Mikhail Lesin, a former adviser to Putin, was found dead in a hotel room. The official ruling claimed the 57-year-old died accidentally of blunt force trauma after falling repeatedly in his room while drunk.
Nikolai Glushkov, former deputy director of Russia’s national airline Aeroflot, was granted political asylum in the UK in 2010. In 2018 he was found strangled with a dog lead at his home in New Malden, South West London.
In 2021 a coroner ruled the 68-year-old was unlawfully killed, with evidence suggesting his death was made to look like a suicide.
The body count in Russia itself has continued during Putin’s reign.
‘Pure mafia’
Among the most high profile was whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky, who was detained in 2008 after reporting a £185million fraud by Russian tax officials.
The Russian tax adviser was then arrested himself and, despite repeated pleas for medical help, died in detention in 2009, aged 37.
His cause of death was given as toxic shock and heart failure brought on by pancreatitis, which had been diagnosed by a prison doctor but not treated. Guards also beat him with a rubber truncheon, causing a “cranio-cerebral injury”.
Sergei’s death led to an international outcry. The 2012 US Magnitsky Act allows America to freeze assets of Russia officials allegedly involved in human rights violations. A similar law — which allows visas to be denied — was passed in the UK.
In 2015 opposition politician and arch Putin critic Boris Nemtsov was gunned down on a bridge outside the Kremlin. The 55-year-old had spoken out about Putin’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
Russian authorities convicted five Chechens of his murder but the mastermind was never found.
Since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine at least 11 wealthy Russians have died in circumstances some have questioned. Three were alleged to have killed their families before committing suicide.
Some have pointed to Russia’s high suicide rate, others suggest they may have been lent on to provide finance for the war.
British financier and activist Bill Browder said: “These people all sit in front of large cashflows or assets. This is pure Mafia.”
A number of people mysteriously toppled from windows.
In December 2022, Russian tycoon Pavel Antov is believed to have “fallen from a hotel terrace” in Rayagada, India, on December 25, days after his 65th birthday.
The politician and millionaire had criticised Putin’s war with Ukraine on WhatsApp but quickly deleted the message. Ravil Maganov, 67, the head of Russia’s second-largest oil producer Lukoil, also fell from a window in 2022 after he called for “the soonest termination of the armed conflict”.
Businessman Dan Rapoport, 52, publicly condemned the Russia-Ukraine war multiple times and emphasised his support for Ukraine. He was discovered dead in front of a high-rise apartment building in Washington DC in August 2022. US authorities said his manner of death was “undetermined”.
Activist Bill Browder said: “I think the circumstances of his death are extremely suspicious. Whenever someone who is in a negative view of the Putin regime dies suspiciously, one should rule out foul play, not rule it in.”
Shipping magnate Alexander Subbotin, 43, a former Lukoil chief, died that year too, following bizarre suggestions he was treated with toad venom to cure a hangover and suffered a heart attack.
Also in 2022 Yuri Voronov, 61, who had links to energy giant Gazprom, was found dead in the pool of his St Petersburg home with a gunshot wound to his head.
A Grand Power pistol was nearby and spent cases were at the bottom of the pool. Vladislav Avayev, 51, ex-Gazprombank chief, and Sergei Protosenya, 55, a boss at Russian gas giant Novatek, died in alleged murder-suicides in April 2022.
In March 2022 Putin had venomously warned he would spit out those he deemed traitors “like gnats”.
A warped and cold-hearted killer who, by rights, should face international justice.
