Chapter 6: Russian State responsibility – introduction

Chapter 6: Russian State responsibility – introduction

¶9.33 A great deal of the evidence that I have heard in the course of the Inquiry has touched

on the possibility that one or more organisations of the Russian State may have ordered Mr Litvinenko's killing, or that they may otherwise have been involved or complicit in his death. That issue has been referred to, both during the course of the Inquiry and in this Report, as the issue, of Russian State responsibility.

¶9.34 In the following chapters I will address the following themes in the evidence relating to possible Russian State responsibility for Mr Litvinenko's death:

¶9.35 In chapter 7 I will consider the evidence that Russia was the source of the polonium 210 that killed Mr Litvinenko.

¶9.36 In chapter 8 I will consider the motives that the Russian State may have had for

wishing Mr Litvinenko dead, and evidence that I heard as to the history of other killings and deaths of opponents of President Putin.

¶9.37 In chapter 9 I will consider the evidence of links between Mr Lugovoy and Mr Kovtun and the Russian State.

¶9.38 In chapter 10 I will consider events that have taken place since Mr Litvinenko's death, and what inferences may be drawn from them.

¶9.39 In chapter 11 I will set out my conclusions on the question of whether any Russian

¶State organisation was responsible for Mr Litvinenko's death.

¶9.40 In chapter 12, I will address the further question of whether Nikolai Patrushev (the head

of the FSB in 2006) and/or President Putin bear any responsibility for Mr Litvinenko's death.

¶9.41 One witness about whom I should say a little more at this stage is Professor Robert

Service, who was until recently Professor of Russian History at Oxford University. I have already referred to his evidence on a number of occasions. Professor Service was instructed by the Inquiry to provide expert evidence on Russian history and politics. He produced two reports, both of which I adduced in evidence.6 He also gave oral evidence at the Inquiry hearings.7

¶9.42 For the avoidance of any doubt, Professor Service did not have access to any of the

closed material and was not involved in the closed hearings. It follows from this that the material that is available to me and upon which I am able to base my findings is more extensive than the material upon which Professor Service based his views.

¶9.43 I say at once that I found Professor Service to be a most impressive and helpful

witness. His mastery of the subject was apparent, but just as notable – and of great assistance to me – was the conspicuous care that he took in highlighting the issues where the limited nature of the source material available to him meant that he was unable to express a decided view one way or the other.

¶INQ019146; INQ020316; INQ020998 7

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¶Part 9 | Chapters 1 to 12 | Who directed the killing?

¶9.44 The paucity of the public information relating to the inner workings of President Putin's

administration was, indeed, a theme of Professor Service's evidence. As he put the matter: "It cannot be emphasised too heavily that public access to information about Russian politics has undergone a severe constriction since Vladimir Putin's accession to Presidential power in 2000."⁸⁸ Goldfarb 26/28-35 Bukovsky 26/95-96 INQ018943 Horwell 33/61

¶9.45 As I have indicated, there were occasions in the course of his evidence where

Professor Service stated that the lack of public information in respect of an issue meant that he was unable to express a view about it. He suggested, moreover, that there were reasons going beyond academic or judicial rigour why this Inquiry ought to be careful to restrict its conclusions to matters that were provable on the evidence before it. He said this:9

"But we have to be really cautious – and there's another aspect of this that exercises me, and that's that Russians want to see us fairly going through evidence in a scholarly environment or a judicial environment or an Inquiry like this in a fashion that they know doesn't happen in their own country. So we must not sink at all below our conventional standards. We absolutely mustn't, because some of what we do in relation to this Inquiry will get back to Moscow, and we must not give them the opportunity to say that we failed to respect our own standards because those are standards that are really worth keeping to."

I wholeheartedly endorse these sentiments, which accurately reflect my approach to the evidence.

¶INQ019146 (page 4 paragraph 9)⁹⁹ Marina Litvinenko 3/3-6 HMG000078 INQ019146 (page 22 paragraph 68) Cotlick 25/76-81 March 2015

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