So I've become intrigued by this new murdered Russian ex-spy plot that has been playing out on the evening news for the past week. So basically this russian ex-spy (Litvinenko) was poisoned using the radioactive isotope Polonium-210 while in London (possibly at a trendy sushi restaurant called Itsu). Litvinenko was trying to investigate the killing of a Russian journalist writing about the conflict in Chechnya. She was a very liberal writer, who wrote against Russia's policies in Chechnya. She was murdered in an elevator in her apartment building. Looks like both were hired killings by the russian intelligence agency. Polonium is not smthg just found lying around...it is artificially manufactured by major nuclear countries. Its pretty interesting to read about. Its like freakin' James Bond or smthg. Marketing ploy? I don't know.

[Edited on November 25, 2006 at 6:58 PM. Reason : lklk]

11/25/2006 6:56:55 PM

You need to buy a few vowels

11/25/2006 6:58:34 PM

who spells Chris with a "K"?

11/25/2006 7:00:23 PM

kommies

11/25/2006 7:09:47 PM

germans

11/25/2006 7:19:42 PM

I am interested in seeing how this plays out, it has the potential to cause alot of problems in Euro-Russian relations

11/25/2006 7:26:55 PM

i like this story also

aint no doubt in my mind russia has been doing some shady ass shit in the past 5 or so years

11/25/2006 7:27:52 PM

just the past 5?

11/25/2006 7:34:36 PM

i cant stand that putin guy

i dont trust him for a second

11/25/2006 7:41:24 PM

i've seen into his soul and he's a good guy. i'll call him "pooty"

11/25/2006 7:52:32 PM

wt, wht?

11/25/2006 8:39:09 PM

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/11/25/uk.spy/index.html

[Edited on November 25, 2006 at 9:20 PM. Reason : http://www.cnn.com/video/partners/clickability/index.html?url=/video/world/2006/11/24/boulden.russia]

11/25/2006 9:18:14 PM

It's the same thing that happened to Viktor Yushchenko. He was a candidate running against Russia's puppet in the Ukraine and got poisoned as well. Thankfully, he survived and won the election.

Russia still possesses the worst traits of...well, Russia. The Russian Empire was just as sketchy an autocracy as the USSR was. What y'all know about the Oprichnina?

[Edited on November 25, 2006 at 9:53 PM. Reason : .]

11/25/2006 9:45:54 PM

While I'm sure Putin has been having people eliminated left and right this particular case strikes me as rediculous. Disappearing, being gunned down in the streets, killed by your wife, murder/suicide, all these are believable. But killing someone using an obscure drug which is only produced by nuclear countries? Shit, that just screams set-up. If I wanted to convince the world that Putin was killing people I'd pick a vocal critic in a foreign country, kill them in an obviously professional way, and make it look bungled to leave fake KGB incriminating evidence.

Of course, it so loudly screams set-up that maybe the russians would do it believing it would be so obvious no one would believe the russians did it, thus getting away with it.

11/25/2006 10:40:30 PM

^^Yeh i remember that dude he had those nasty boils all over his face. Sucks. I'm sure the superficial marks were nothing compared to the internal damage.

11/26/2006 2:09:10 AM

I think LoneSnark said it right...why poison him russians are smarter than that, if the real government wanted him killed he would have been dead and no one would ever know he was gone. But this looked like someone wanted to fram the government and push the points that Litvinenko was saying about the government, I say the greatest way to get your voice heard is to die.

11/26/2006 2:27:05 AM

There's a lot of details we don't have here. Is polonium obscure to the point where you might assume it wouldn't be recognized in an autopsy? Was it maybe supposed to kill in a much less suspicious way?

11/26/2006 1:19:00 PM

yeah, i've heard that the polonium isotope is pretty tough to detect, generally.

11/26/2006 5:59:31 PM

^^^^ I was in ukraine during the 'orange revolution' and saw him from a distance and then saw him face to face at Georgetown. The damage done to his face is horrendous. They have no idea what the long term effects to his body will be since there arent many cases of people living after receiving that much of the poison.

11/26/2006 6:34:02 PM

^^^ Alpha-emitters INSIDE the body would be very hard to detect externally. Alpha particles, even high energy ones, have very short range. It's possible the assasination was botched and he was given much more polonium than was required to do the job.

11/26/2006 6:54:13 PM

they said its like 10000 times more deadly than cyanide. The amount given to him was probably sprayed on food or smthg. If there was a piece large enough to see it would literally glow blue. Some crazy shit.

11/26/2006 11:13:37 PM

The case with Yushchenko alone still makes me think that its either the Russian government, or, if they are as smart as they are supposed to be, radical conservative elements acting apart from the government. Considering that the common thread here is opposition to Putin, I'd say he had some sort of distant hand pulling the strings here.

Maybe you've all overestimated the Russian gov., they've been cracking down hard lately.

11/26/2006 11:36:05 PM

Quote :

"Of course, it so loudly screams set-up that maybe the russians would do it believing it would be so obvious no one would believe the russians did it, thus getting away with it."

i agree

what i'm wondering, is how does someone put this shit in the food in the first place

i see one post were if its visible its glowing blue...but i mean not even that

the shit is like radioactive...how would one even go about putting it in someones food and being descreet(sp?) while not fucking themselves over by handling the radioactive stuff

11/27/2006 1:45:08 AM

you could probably handle a container of it with little ill effect, as long as you didn't inhale/inject/injest it.

11/27/2006 12:35:32 PM

Really for the most part alphas are stopped by the layer of dead skin on your body.

If I remember it correctly almost all alphas are stopped by 10cm of air. So like ^ said, as long as you don't ingest this stuff you will be just fine.

Polonium emits a 5.4 MeV alpha



Just read the toxicity at wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium

4500 Ci/g wow

Quote :

"The maximum permissible body burden for ingested polonium is only 0.03 microcuries, which represents a particle weighing only 6.8 x 10-12 g. Weight for weight it is about 2.5 x 10^11 times as toxic as hydrocyanic acid. The maximum allowable concentration for soluble polonium compounds in air is about 2 x 10^-11 microcuries/cm3."

http://periodic.lanl.gov/elements/84.html


[Edited on November 27, 2006 at 2:14 PM. Reason : ]

11/27/2006 1:53:58 PM

FWIW - I have no idea if what i'm about to say is the case.

Seeing as how Litvinenko was an ex spy- there's no telling if he was killed for the journalist investigation or something else.

one reason you do such a publicly visible kind of death, giving the person a couple months of time to say or do whatever they have to do (dangerous wild card there), would be to get at someone close to Litvinenko, or someone who has a connection to him. Basically send a message saying "If we can get his ass, we can get yours too". As far as who the message is intended for at that point though- is anybody's guess.


Just another option on the table.

11/27/2006 4:13:29 PM

yeh these recent killings are a warning to those criticizing putin.

11/27/2006 10:47:31 PM

this shit is getting interesting.

12/2/2006 11:42:44 AM

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6169193.stm

Polonium-210 discovered in Hamburg, traced back to an associate of Livinenko. Wow, this is quite a case. I'm really getting into this.

I still hold to the belief that you are all overestimating the Russian gov. on this. I think someone who was in charge of carrying this out either wants to cause a riff b/w Europe and Russia (moving them away from a possible EU alliance) or simply didn't think his plan through. I'd wager on the former, but that's just my own conspiracy theory .

Great commentary and speculation on the whole thing: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6180432.stm

[Edited on December 11, 2006 at 1:24 PM. Reason : ,,]

12/11/2006 1:20:13 PM

I actually no longer give credit to governments by saying "oh well, they would have done it differently"

12/11/2006 1:30:16 PM

Interesting theory, LoneSnark. An ex-KGB agent--with the know-how to make it look like a government job--hired as hitman by one or more powerful Russian business owners, maybe? It's not only possible, it's likely.

12/12/2006 2:40:08 AM

Pity MathFreak isn't around anymore. I would have loved to hear his take on it...

[Edited on December 12, 2006 at 9:09 AM. Reason : Punctuation]

12/12/2006 9:08:58 AM

You guys do realize they used to use this stuff in record de dust brushes and shit.

12/12/2006 3:54:20 PM

what happened to the MathFreak anyhow?

12/12/2006 11:57:38 PM

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6177531.stm

Putin has filled his government with ex-KGB members. It's not suprising that the government might demonstrate some of their qualities, without regard to international opinion.

12/13/2006 3:37:54 PM

^^from the looks of things, he dissapeared after the olympics. too bad, he was a good guy.

Quote :

"Former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was murdered because of information he held on a powerful Kremlin figure, an ex-business associate has said. "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6184919.stm

once again, you've overestimated the Russian gov.

Quote :

"one reason you do such a publicly visible kind of death, giving the person a couple months of time to say or do whatever they have to do (dangerous wild card there), would be to get at someone close to Litvinenko, or someone who has a connection to him. Basically send a message saying "If we can get his ass, we can get yours too". As far as who the message is intended for at that point though- is anybody's guess."

precisely. people know who did it, and the gov. will use this to intimidate. no worries for them tho, putin could win another election right now, if he was allowed to run again (term limits). he's that popular.

[Edited on December 21, 2006 at 5:15 PM. Reason : .]

12/21/2006 5:11:24 PM

what's new w/ the polonium?

12/25/2006 2:52:24 PM

first of all, Mathfreak is working and living in Colorado.

Secondly, from what I understand, Litvinenko was killed by an assassin named Igor the Assassin who is described as a semi-overweight middle aged russian who walks with a limp and speaks perfect English and Portugesse. No, I'm not making that stuff up.

I also forgot the part about how he is a Judo master

[Edited on December 25, 2006 at 3:41 PM. Reason : .]

12/25/2006 3:38:36 PM

Hmmm.... history does go in circles!

3/7/2018 4:13:25 PM

Let's not remind Trump that making journalists disappear is a possibility.

3/7/2018 4:45:40 PM

So apparently 21 people, including first responders were harmed. Most not seriously. Also, Russia’s UK embassy is openly trolling. Explain to me the difference between this and what Kim Jong Un did aside from this had way more collateral damage.

3/8/2018 2:37:02 PM

Guessing we dont want to get called out for assassinating people too

3/11/2018 11:29:22 PM

So the UK should be extremely upset if this was Russian state-sanctioned murder.

Using nerve gas in public? That would seem almost like an act of war. They've found traces in the public eatery in which they think the couple was poisoned.

3/12/2018 9:41:21 AM

This is kind of nuts. Putin gives not a single fuck now that he’s “friend” is in the White House.

Somewhere, Glenn Greenwald is furiously concocting a story to blame this on the minority party in America.

[Edited on March 12, 2018 at 1:56 PM. Reason : X]

3/12/2018 1:56:15 PM

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/12/russia-highly-likely-to-be-behind-poisoning-of-spy-says-theresa-may

Britain at the very least blaming Russia for "losing" the nerve agent. However seems they are pretty convinced it was a sanctioned act...

3/12/2018 2:27:44 PM

Hawks are so sad to miss out on a golden opportunity for war. If only we had a president who wasn't controled by Putin, we would have declared war by now.

3/12/2018 9:38:35 PM

Quote :

"The Telegraph is reporting that Nikolai Glushkov, an close associate of Putin Critic Boris Berezovsky has been found dead in the UK"

I blame Pelosi and Schiff.

3/13/2018 11:35:45 AM

^^ On Russia? Do people not remember the Cold War. It's not like all that military equipment just evaporated.

3/13/2018 11:52:33 AM

^^?

3/13/2018 12:18:49 PM

^^If they use it they get to buy more and extract more wealth

Quote :

"Taking it up a notch or 10, Russia's FM spokeswoman wants to know who Britain thinks it is issuing ultimatums after Putin's speech showing off Russia's new nuclear weapons. The TV anchor ends: 'We're not afraid of sanctions, we have missiles"

3/13/2018 7:08:22 PM