Putin’s hit list: from poisoned tea to mysterious falls, the grisly fate of the Kremlin’s enemies

The methods are many and varied: poisoning, shooting, plane crashes and, the simplest of them all, the mysterious falling out of a window. John Kampfner on how Putin transformed state assassinations of his foes and political opponents onto an industrial scale

Punishment for crossing Vladimir Putin is sometimes swift (Getty)

‘‘The reason why it all happened is one man’s hatred and fear – one man hiding in a bunker. I mortally offended him by surviving an attempt at my life he ordered. And then I committed an even more serious offence: I didn’t go into hiding. And that’s driving this thieving little man in his bunker out of his mind.’’

In Russia, when you are put on trial, you are held inside a courtroom cage. This did not stop Alexei Navalny from challenging his nemesis, Vladimir Putin, with the one tool available to him, the power of speech.

To a brittle dictator, there is only crime worse than political opposition; it is mockery. For the best part of a decade, Navalny had been investigating Putin’s wealth and Mafia-style nexus of crime, sometimes earnestly, sometimes by poking fun at the man in the Kremlin, interspersing the data he uncovered in his films, vlogs and blogs with hilarious memes. Putin did everything he could to silence him. He had him poisoned, not once but twice. Extraordinarily, Navalny survived, only to be thrown into prison, his sentence regularly extended, his health steadily deteriorating.