There is an old rule of war that anyone who has spent a single day at a real front understands: a bullet is, strangely enough, a form of respect. The man who fires looks — if only for a fraction of a second — into the face of the one he kills. He takes on the shot, the sound, the body falling before his eyes. It is still murder. But it is a murder unafraid of being seen.

Poison is afraid.

Poison is dropped into a cup of tea, and the poisoner walks off to drink his own — unpoisoned, with the same friendly smile. Poison is left on the door handle of another man’s house, and the poisoner flies home in business class, with wine, with the feeling of a job well done. Poison is smeared into underwear while the victim sleeps, unsuspecting, in the next hotel room. Poison is the weapon of the one who fears, above all else, being recognized. Not because he fears retribution — these people never fear retribution; they have a state to hide and decorate them. They fear one thing: looking into the eyes of the person they have decided to kill.

And poison has a second function, viler still than the death itself: it sows doubt. A bullet leaves no room for versions — there is a body, a wound, a trajectory. Poison is week after week in intensive care; it is toxicologists contradicting one another; it is state television explaining, ever so helpfully, that the victim simply had “an allergy,” simply had “diabetes,” simply ate “bad chicken at the airport.” Poison kills twice: once the body, once the truth of what happened. It turns a murder into gossip, and a prosecutor into a conspiracy theorist.

This volume is about fourteen stories of people the state poisoned over the last twenty-five years. A writer, a poet, a spy, a presidential candidate, an oligarch, an arms manufacturer, journalists, a human-rights defender, politicians, peace negotiators. Each with a different scale of fame, a different degree of proof, a different fate: some died, some survived, some still do not know the exact name of the thing that nearly killed them. But the method is one and the same, decade after decade, from London to Ufa, from Salisbury to Kyiv. This is the signature — not the broad, showy signature of a killer who takes pride in his work, but the small, squeamish, always-deniable handwriting of a coward.

We name every one of them. We skip no one — not even where the proof is thinner than the prosecutor inside us would like. Where the poison is not confirmed in a laboratory, we say so plainly. But we record this: this many coincidences in a row is no longer coincidence. It is handwriting.

Case File: Russia. Volume II. We begin.

Alexander Litvinenko was an FSB officer who did the unforgivable: in 1998 he publicly, at a press conference, accused his own superiors of ordering the murder of the businessman Boris Berezovsky. Not anonymously. Face uncovered, in uniform, before the cameras. Two years later he fled to Britain with his wife Marina and their small son. In London he went on doing the same thing — speaking aloud: he wrote books arguing that the FSB itself, in his account, had organized the 1999 apartment bombings to launch the Second Chechen War and carry Putin to power. He accused Putin personally of the murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, shot in her own stairwell on the president’s birthday.

Litvinenko broke the cardinal rule of the system he came from: former officers do not leave gracefully and quietly. He left loudly — with documents, with names, ready to testify anywhere, including to the Spanish prosecutors investigating the ties between the Russian mafia and the state. A man who knows the inner kitchen and is unafraid to describe it is a walking leak that no non-disclosure agreement can plug, because he no longer answers to anyone.

On November 1, 2006, Litvinenko met two former KGB colleagues — Andrei Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun — in the bar of London’s Millennium Hotel. They drank tea. In the pot was polonium-210: a radioactive isotope so rare and so difficult to produce that obtaining it all but rules out private initiative. It requires a nuclear reactor, state infrastructure, access that no criminal group possesses without a direct line to a state atomic agency. This was the third attempt: according to the investigation, Lugovoy and Kovtun had tried to poison Litvinenko earlier that same month but, it seems, erred in the dose or the method — he did not fall ill. This time it worked.

Then came three weeks of agony, documented with almost unbearable clarity — because Litvinenko lived to describe it himself. The doctors of University College London could not understand what was happening: his hair fell out, his bone marrow failed, his intestines broke down from within. Only when British physicists found the characteristic gamma spike in his urine did it become clear — polonium. By then it was far too late.

Days before his death, Litvinenko dictated a statement to his friend Alex Goldfarb — knowing he would not survive. Goldfarb read it outside the hospital after he died. Addressing Putin, Litvinenko said: “You may succeed in silencing one man, but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.” He died on November 23, 2006 — the first documented death in world history from acute radiation syndrome caused by deliberately administered polonium-210.

In 2016 the chairman of the British public inquiry, Sir Robert Owen, published his final report: the killing was probably approved by FSB director Nikolai Patrushev and by Putin personally. In 2021 the European Court of Human Rights went further — finding “beyond reasonable doubt” that Lugovoy and Kovtun carried out the murder, and that there were strong grounds to conclude they acted on behalf of the Russian state. Lugovoy was not only never extradited — he became a Duma deputy and received a state decoration from Putin’s own hands.

The radioactive trail the killers left behind proved an unwitting gift to the investigation: polonium contaminated hotel rooms, aircraft, offices — dozens of points across London that British specialists then mapped, methodically, over weeks. The killers, without meaning to, had drawn the map of their own route in radioactive ink.

Sergei Skripal is a former GRU colonel who, in the early 2000s, became a double agent for British intelligence, passing London the names of Russian illegals across Europe for years. Exposed in 2006 and sentenced to 13 years, he was exchanged in 2010 in the famous swap for ten Russian spies, including Anna Chapman. He settled in the quiet English city of Salisbury and lived there unnoticed — until March 4, 2018.

Formally, Skripal had long since paid his due — served his term, been exchanged, lived under British protection, conducted no activity against Russia. But that was precisely the sentence: a system that recognizes no statute of limitations on betrayal was broadcasting a specific message to every present and future defector — an exchange guarantees nothing, an amnesty guarantees nothing, nothing guarantees safety but silence. A double agent must die even years later, even in retirement, even when he is of no practical use to anyone. Especially then — that is the most convincing lesson for the next one.

Two undercover GRU officers — later identified by Bellingcat and the British investigation as Alexander Mishkin and Anatoly Chepiga — flew to Britain, made a reconnaissance trip to Salisbury, then returned and applied a substance to the front-door handle of Skripal’s home. The substance was Novichok — a military-grade nerve agent developed in the Soviet chemical-weapons program, so potent that British experts later assessed the quantity found in a single perfume bottle used to carry it could, properly dispersed, have killed thousands.

Sergei and his daughter Yulia, visiting from Moscow, were found unconscious on a bench in a Salisbury shopping precinct. Both survived — after weeks in intensive care.

And nearly four months later, in nearby Amesbury, Dawn Sturgess began to die — a forty-four-year-old local woman with no connection whatsoever to intelligence, espionage or politics. Her partner Charlie Rowley had found the perfume bottle the killers discarded, still holding Novichok, and gave it to Dawn. On June 30 she dabbed it on her wrists.

Dawn Sturgess died on July 8, 2018 — not because she was an enemy of the state, not because she knew something, not because she stood in anyone’s way. She died because a military nerve agent meant for one specific man was thrown away in a public place, like used packaging, and picked up by a passerby who wanted to give a gift to the woman he loved. This is the point in the anatomy of poison that is rarely said aloud: a weapon designed for pinpoint elimination does not care who holds the bottle. State terrorism does not aim — it scatters.

The final report of the British public inquiry into the Sturgess case, published on December 4, 2025, established that the operation must have been authorized personally by President Putin. The two perpetrators were named, charged in absentia, put on the international wanted list — and, of course, never surrendered. Mishkin and Chepiga remain at liberty in Russia.