Marina Litvinenko
Marina Litvinenko, the widow of former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko, has filed a 3.5 million euro claim against Russia with the European Court of Human Rights. The wife of the deceased is demanding compensation for the poisoning of her husband in London with a radioactive substance, The Guardian reports.
In addition, Litvinenko asks the ECHR to recognize the connection between the murder of an ex-FSB officer and the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in 2018, as well as the incident with Alexei Navalny in 2020. According to Litvinenko, all crimes were sponsored by the Russian state. “It was a chemical weapon, a prohibited weapon of destruction,” she told the newspaper.
In 2000, Alexander Litvinenko left Russia after several criminal cases were opened against him. Two years before his departure, he, along with a group of FSB officers, announced the allegedly received instructions to eliminate the oligarch Boris Berezovsky. In November 2006, Litvinenko, while in the UK, was poisoned. British experts claimed to have found significant amounts of radioactive polonium-210 in his body. London considers guilty of his murder of a former FSO employee, now a State Duma deputy Andrei Lugovoi – he met with Litvinenko shortly before his death. In Russia, they deny all charges of involvement in the murder of a former intelligence officer.
Former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, according to British authorities, were poisoned in March 2018 with a nerve agent Novichok developed in the USSR. London believes the attack was sanctioned by Russia's top leadership. Moscow denies any involvement in the incident with the Skripals.
Alexei Navalny became ill on August 20, during a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. The plane urgently landed in Omsk, two days later the victim was taken to a Berlin clinic. German experts said that traces of a substance from the Novichok group were found in his body. At the same time, Russian doctors did not find any poisons in Navalny's body.
