Litvenenko, on Sundance Now

In 2018, the “Salisbury” poisoning attacks on Sergei and Yulia Skripal fatally killed an innocent British subject, who had no connection to Russia whatsoever. It was a pretty brazen assassination attempt on British soil, but obviously Putin was not very impressed by the UK government’s response to his previous hit-job executed in England, against a naturalized British citizen, back in 2006. Of course, the authorities had to provide some proof before taking punitive action. That was the job of various detective and investigators of New Scotland Yard, whose procedural work drives the four-episode mini-series, Litvenenko, written by George Kay and directed by Jim Field Smith, which starts premieres tomorrow on Sundance Now.

It is spooky how much the once-and-future Doctor Who David Tennant looks like Alexander Litvenenko, especially during his death bed scenes. The former FSB agent and outspoken critic of Putin’s “mafia state” (his own term), defected to the UK, becoming fully naturalized literally on the day of his poisoning. Initially, the somewhat fictionalized DI Brent Hyatt is not sure how to proceed, when the still living Litvenenko tries to report his own murder, like Edmund O’Brien in D.O.A. However, the interview tapes he records with the poisoned man supplied the foundation for the marathon investigation that followed.

Hyatt worked murders, which is a serious responsibility within the Yard, but a case like this was transferred to Detective Superintendent Clive Timmons, who oversaw the counter-terrorism office. He kept Hyatt and his DS attached to the case, because the DI had cultivated the trust of Litvenenko’s widow, Marina, and for his expertise investigating homicides. The case gets personal for Hyatt, since he saw Litvenenko waste away in the hospital. He also has his own scare, when the forensics department finally identifies Polonium 210 as the lethal agent involved. It is one of the deadliest Polonium isotopes known to man, but it is only produced in Russia.

Kay and Smith do a remarkable job establishing the damning case against Putin, without miring the series in minutiae. After watching Litvenenko, you should be able to shut down any of his internet trolls who haven’t been drafted to be cannon fodder in his invasion of Ukraine. Obviously, this is an opportune time for series about Putin’s disregard for international law and human rights to release. However, it is most of all a cracking good police procedural-geopolitical spy thriller-hybrid.

For a change, Neil Maskell gets to play an unambiguous good guy—and he is terrific as Hyatt. The rapport he develops with Margarita Levieva playing Litvenenko’s widow is quite poignant. The same is true for his unfortunately limited scenes with Tennant in the doomed title role. It is sadly but necessarily a small part, but Tennant is totally convincing. Frankly, they needed someone of his caliber, to show how Litvenenko’s principled persona could take on such heroically tragic proportions.

Once Upon a Time in Londongrad, on Peacock

London needs to lose its suffixes. In 2006, Melanie Phillips described the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in her expose, Londonistan. Since then, the term “Londongrad” was coined to describe the London financial sector’s role as a safe haven for dirty Russian oligarchs’ money. Neither is a good look for the capitol of a major Western democracy. Unfortunately, that influx of dubious Russian money also led to a number of Russian state-sanctioned assassinations on British soil. The Buzzfeed journalists who broke the story connect the dots in the six-part Once Upon a Time in Londongrad, which premieres tomorrow on Peacock.

According to the Metropolitan Police, Scot (with one “t”) Young killed himself by leaping from his fashionable townhouse window, just like his associate, Boris Berezovsky also committed suicide. Anyone who knows anything about contemporary Russian politics finds the latter contention laughable. As a dissident, the former oligarch Berezovsky was one of Putin’s most prominent critics. He helped facilitate the defection of former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, whom even New Scotland Yard agrees was poisoned with polonium.

For journalist Heidi Blake, the story started with the strange circumstances surrounding Young’s death. She and her colleagues were not even thinking of Russia, until they found multiple connections to Berezovsky in Young’s records. From there, they followed leads, the way the Metropolitan police should have.

Eventually, the team explains how they linked fourteen mysterious deaths to Russia, including Young, Berezovsky, and Litvinenko. Perhaps the weirdest case is that of Gareth Williams, a MI6 code-breaker, whom the London cops concluded committed suicide, by stuffing himself in a gym bag and locking it from the outside. Seriously, they stand by that farcical position.

Obviously, something is rotten in London, starting with the Metropolitan force. Yet, Blake and her colleagues were largely dismissed as alarmists and conspiracy theorists, until Russian defector Sergei Skripal, his daughter, and a police officer were poisoned with a Russian Novichuk nerve agent, which also murdered an innocent bystander.

Hunting the KGB Killers: The Litvinenko Case on Acorn TV

He was a British subject, assassinated on British soil, by a foreign power, employing the most radioactive substance known to man. Wars have been started over lesser provocations. It is inconceivable an operation of that magnitude could be executed without the direct consent of Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. The mere acquisition of Polonium 210 would require coordination at the highest levels of government. Yet, we can confidently ascribe responsibility to Putin and his henchmen, because Litvinenko himself worked with Scotland Yard to solve his own murder during his final hours. The high stakes investigation and Russian’s attempts to cover-up the truth are conclusively revealed in the documentary-special, Hunting the KGB Killers, directed by Chris Malone, which starts streaming on Acorn TV tomorrow.

Litvinenko has been closely linked with Chechen dissidents, but his real role in the FSB (the renamed KGB) is often conveniently overlooked. According to Litvinenko (whose credibility has been tragically established beyond reasonable doubt), he was promoted to a secret division of the FSB responsible for assassinating the Kremlin’s political and economic rivals. Obviously, it is still in business. Ill-advisedly, Litvinenko had called a meeting with the newly elected Putin, hoping the president would halt such abuses. Instead, he had to defect to the UK with his wife Marina and their son Anatoly, who address Litvinenko’s assassination on-camera for the first time in KGB Killers.

Lead investigator DI Brian Tarpey takes viewers through his inquiry, step-by-step, starting with a meeting with an unnamed MI5 agent, who turned out to be Litvinenko’s handler. With his identity confirmed, the dying Litvinenko willingly submitted to a “living autopsy” to determine the agent of his poisoning. When Polonium-210 was determined to be the cause of his impending death, it unleashed a hard target search through the London establishments he frequented, as well as a very real public health scare. Tarpey’s team even journeyed to Russia, where they were stonewalled and also poisoned with more benign gastrointestinal bacteria.

Although its running time clocks in just under an hour, KGB Killers is packed with stunning information. Frankly, it is an outrage that the world is not more outraged over this crime. Russian apologists and stooges have used a lot of disinformation and red herrings to distract the western media from the fundamental issues. This was a British subject, who was cooperating with western intelligence and law enforcement agencies to expose Russian crime syndicates linked to Putin and his oligarch cronies.

The respect Tarpey and his colleagues have for Litvinenko comes through loud and clear. The details on their dogged pursuit of the murderers, Anjdrey Lugovoy (now a member of Russia’s parliament and hence immune from prosecution) and Dmitri Kovtun, is also highly instructive. Although the iconic photo of the emaciated Litvinenko is often shown during KGB Killers, Malone also uses dramatic re-enactments of the whistle-blower’s final days. Documentary purists might have mixed feelings on such a strategy, but it must be conceded Andrew Byron (a bit-player in Wonder Woman) is an eerie dead-ringer for Litvinenko. Eddie Marsan’s narration is also totally professional and gives the film some name-recognition (if star-power is too strong a term).

KGB Killers is a seamless chronicle that will shock viewers with the full magnitude and viciousness of the FSB’s crimes under Putin. Yet, it also keeps the human element in perspective through the memories of the surviving Litvinenkos and the Scotland Yard investigators. It is a film all Americans should watch, starting with the president.

Let’s be honest, the West’s triumph over Communism during the Cold War was also the greatest political victory in the history of the right/left divide. Yet, Trump seems determined to retroactively sabotage that victory, by openly courting the Soviets’ successor in spirit and oppressive practice. He is not just compromising American national security. He is also jeopardizing the legacy of the American conservative movement. Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, and Barry Goldwater must be weeping bitter tears in their graves.

To get a sense of who Putin really is, Hunting the KGB Killers is very highly recommended when it launches on Acorn TV tomorrow (8/14).

Polonium Friday

“Who lost Russia?” That is a question that will soon be asked with increasing regularity. The appointment of Vladimir Putin as Prime Minister in 1999 essentially ended Russia’s experiment with democracy, which he soon replaced with a Stalinist personality cult. The assassination of dissident Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko, via a radioactive Polonium-210 mickey slipped into his tea, served as a wake-up call to many of the nature of the Putin regime and would inspire Andrei Nekrasov’s damning documentary Poisoned By Polonium (French trailer here), opening in New York this Friday.

Initially an interview subject, Litvinenko became Nekrasov’s friend. Both had something in common: conflict with Russian/Soviet intelligence services. As a student, Kekrasov had been persecuted and expelled for not informing on classmates to the KGB. Litvinenko was the dissident whistleblower who had publicly accused the succeeding FSB of widespread corruption. (In fact, the film explains the Soviet KGB simply morphed into the Russian FSB, with no distinction made in the history of the two on its official website.)

Much of Nekrasov’s footage of Litvinenko is intimate, to the point of eeriness. Early in Polonium, the dissident looks into the camera and says: “If anything should happen to me, I beg you to show this tape to the world.” While there was independent television in Russia, Litvinenko did appear on air to accuse the FSB of committing extortion and assassinations with the foreknowledge and consent of Putin. Using his late friend’s information as a starting point, Nekrasov connects the dots between Putin and SPAG, a shady German conglomerate with ties to the Russian mob, the Stasi, and the Columbian drug cartels. He also shines a light on the French government’s collaboration with the Putin regime—not exactly a shocker there.

However, the Russian war on Chechnya looms largest in Polonium’s catalogue of Kremlin crimes. We hear the former FSB Colonel and other critics, like journalist Anna Politkovskaya (who was conveniently executed in her apartment elevator mere weeks before the Polonium incident), pointedly accuse the government of complicity in the 1999 apartment bombing and the Nord-Ost Moscow Theater hostage crisis, which were used as provocations for military action against the breakaway republic.

In truth, one of the more awkward sequences of Polonium is an attempt to explain his deathbed conversion to Islam as a sort of ecumenical spiritual impulse, with Nekrasov taking great pains to distinguish Caucasus Islam from more virulent Middle Eastern variants. While we can never really know Litvinenko’s motivations during those excruciatingly painful final honors, it seems more plausible that his conversion was simply his final expression of solidarity with the Chechen people he had come to make common cause with.

If the occasion of Polonium were not so tragic—the death of a friend—one would argue Nekrasov was remarkably fortunate in the scenes he was able to document. After an interview, one of Litvinenko’s killers actually offers the filmmaker a cup of tea (thanks, but no thanks). Again, maybe not so fortunate but certainly effective, we see Nekrasov discover his home has been mysteriously ransacked after he starts Polonium.

Nekrasov seems to represent the left wing of Putin’s opposition, so he deserves credit for including a wide spectrum of criticism of the current regime. Particularly notable is some refreshingly insightful commentary from philosopher André Glucksmann, who cautions critics of Putin’s crony capitalism to give proper credit to the Russian capitalists also struggling for free expression and democracy.

Polonium is by necessity a mixed bag of footage, but Nekrasov cuts it together remarkably effectively. At times the film is flat-out chilling, as when Putin cold-bloodedly tells reporters: “Mr. Litvinenko is unfortunately not Lazarus.” Altogether it is a cold, hard, slap-in-the-face warning about the Putin’s neo-Soviet regime, yet highly watchable throughout. In his footage, Nekrasov shows an interesting visual sense and captures some extraordinarily telling moments on film. This is an important documentary, well worth seeking out. It opens Friday in New York at the Quad, hopefully rolling out to more cities soon thereafter.

(Thanks to La Russophobe for sharing this review with their readers.)