In 2004, Viktor Yuschenko was Ukraine’s most promising candidate to oust Leonid Kuchma, an unpopular president who served for a decade and enjoyed close ties with Russia. Yuschenko won the election later that year, but at a steep cost: he’d been poisoned with a near-fatal amount of dioxin, which left him disfigured…

Alexander Litvinenko, a former KBG officer turned Russian dissident, died in 2006 after drinking green tea laced with polonium 210 in the company of two Russian men at a hotel bar in London. A British inquiry into his murder has found that Vladimir Putin “probably approved” it.

During the final day of a public inquiry into Russian dissent Alexander Litvinenko’s death, a lawyer for Litvinenko’s widow said Vladimir Putin “personally ordered” the apparent assassination. Litvinenko, a former FSB and KGB spy, died in November 2006, three weeks after drinking tea laced with the radioactive element…