Sasha embraced Marina and congratulated her on the anniversary, but Marina could see his thoughts were elsewhere; he had that intense, excited look about him . The author has done a brilliant job of telling the story of Alexander Litvinenko’s earth as well as the court proceedings that took place after, or rathe the lack of. The readers are provide with historical background and terminology of Soviet's KGB and Russian espionage and deception. Recommended to all, particularly to Donald J Trump but perhaps he's already read it and dismissed it as FAKE NEWS?

Trepashkin quoted the words of FSB officer Victor Shebalin saying that everyone who was involved in publication of the book Blowing up Russia would be destroyed and that FSB had deployed three agents to Boston to assassinate Yuri Felshtinsky.

With the same muscular build and close-cropped grey hair as Kovtun, Lugovoy wore a look of professional wariness, his eyes sharp and mistrustful, darting constantly to and fro. While they found two unassuming motiveless assassins, Andrei Lugovoi and Dimity Kovton knew little of their tradecraft. Litvinenko was the man who denounced murder and corruption in the Russian government, fled from the wrath of the Kremlin, came to London and took the shilling of Moscow’s avowed enemy … Now he was a martyr, condemned by foes unknown to an agonised death in a hospital bed thousands of miles from home. And duty was important to Litvinenko; his constant refrain to those who would listen was that he had always behaved loyally and honestly.

We must also consider the two men who the author says carried out the poisoning; Andrei Lugovoi and Dimitry Kovtun, who are accused in this book of not only killing a man, but who glibly poured this extremely dangerous substance down various hotel sinks and could possibly have caused a major health disaster (at one point, one of the men even told his young son to shake Litvinenko’s hand, aware that he had just touched the poison). In a review for The Independent, Anne Penketh said that the book is "a densely written text" and "(f)or those seeking a reason for the killing of Litvinenko, this book contains the possible motive, although it does not mention the role of Berezovsky — sworn enemy of Putin — in bringing it out in the first place. After all, it’s a slight change of pace going from international spy crimes to court room drama – Harding provided good context for this court cases though, and they always seemed relevant to the book.It was only years later – after Putin had refused to extradite the two suspects, invaded both Georgia and Ukraine, and undermined what was left of Russian democracy – that Downing Street agreed to let Owen examine what had happened. And yet every chapter seems to lose its wind by the end – perhaps the Litvinenko story cannot in fact be written as a murder mystery. Goldfarb’s account, written within months of the murder, is intelligent, contextually rich and insightful.

Kovtun in particular comes across as a Walter Mitty-esque clown, the sort of person one would be tempted to dismiss as a fantasist.After Litvinenko was poisoned, confiscated copies of the book were kept by the FSB and destroyed in 2007 "due to death of the accused" Litvinenko. I had first met Akhmed Zakayev in 2003, when he was campaigning to avoid extradition from Britain to Russia. Kovtun graduated in 1986, Lugovoy in 1987, and both went straight into the Kremlin Regiment of the KGB’s Ninth Directorate, charged with the protection of senior state officials in the government and party. He covers back-stories of the main protagonists as well as Putin and several other ‘dissidents’ or ‘traitors’ who also died in mysterious circumstances, in Russia and abroad. It was one of those events that, with hindsight, gains ever greater significance until it seems both to sum up an era, and to herald a new one.

In the light of the events that were to unfold that day, the leaflet Dmitry Kovtun picked up from the check-in desk, describing the hotel as a ‘welcoming, peaceful haven in the heart of London’, now has an air of some poignancy about it. Invited to take part in the investigation, Boris collaborated with SO15 and served as a main consultant to the BBC Panorama documentary “How to Poison a Spy” (BBC One, Monday, 22 Jan 2007 at 20:30). Like them, he too had joined the KGB’s Ninth Directorate and the three had served together until they all officially left the service in 1996. According to Oleg Gordievsky, "For clues as to who wanted Alexander Litvinenko dead, you need look no farther than his book Blowing Up Russia" [28] Sunday Times described the book as "A vivid condemnation of the Putin regime". The CSKA fans there that night belonged to the small minority of Russians who had the financial means to pay for a trip to London.In the US these can be career or commitment pursuits, in Russia they are life and death undertakings.