Former Russian Spy Critically Ill in Britain After Exposure to an Unknown Substance

UPDATE: Another Russian exile found dead in London
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...ikolai-glushkov-found-dead-at-his-london-home
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...ikolai-glushkov-found-dead-at-his-london-home
A Russian exile who was close friends with the late oligarch Boris Berezovsky has been found dead in his London home, according to friends.

Nikolai Glushkov, 68, was discovered by his family and friends late on Monday night. The cause of death is not yet clear. One of his friends, the newspaper editor Damian Kudryavtsev, posted the news on his Facebook page.

Without confirming the man’s name, the Metropolitan police said the counter-terrorism command unit was leading the investigation into the death “as a precaution because of associations that the man is believed to have had”.

It said there was no evidence at present to suggest a link to poisoning in Salisbury of the Russian former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. The Skripals remain in a critical condition.


Police were called by the London ambulance service to a residential address in New Malden at 10.46pm on Monday. “An investigation is under way following the death of a man in his 60s in Kingston borough,” said the Met.

On Tuesday a cluster of blue tents had been erected to cover the front of Glushkov’s house and several uniformed police stood in front of a cordon.

Glushkov’s neighbours painted a picture of a man living a quiet life in south-west London, where he had recently been recovering from an operation.

Ako Mohammed, who runs a barber shop near Glushkov’s home, said the Russian had last come in more than a fortnight ago.

“He was using crutches and had just had an operation on his leg,” he said. “He used to come in every month or so. He was in last about two or three weeks ago and asked us how business was.”

Kate Fitzsimmons, 87, who has lived on the street for more than 30 years, said Glushkov would occasionally wave and smile to her when he came out of his house, directly across from hers. “He seemed like a quiet man. A lady would come sometimes as well but he kept to himself generally.”

In the 1990s Glushkov was a director of the state airline Aeroflot and Berezovsky’s LogoVAZ car company. In 1999, as Berezovsky fell out with Vladimir Putin and fled to the UK, Glushkov was charged with money laundering and fraud. He spent five years in jail and was freed in 2004. Fearing further arrest, he fled to the UK and was granted political asylum.

In 2011 he gave evidence in a court case brought by Berezovsky against fellow oligarch Roman Abramovich, who remained on good terms with the Kremlin. Glushkov told the court he had effectively been taken hostage by Putin’s administration, which wanted to pressure Berezovsky to sell his stake in the TV station ORT.

In court, Berezovsky claimed he and Abramovich had been partners in the 1990s in an oil firm, Sibneft, and accused the Chelsea football club owner of cheating him out of $5bn (£3.2bn). Abramovich denied this. The judge, Mrs Justice Gloster, rejected the claim and described Berezovsky as “deliberately dishonest”.

Glushkov was unhappy with the judgment and launched a formal appeal, citing “bias”. Meanwhile, Berezovsky disappeared from public life. In March 2013 he was found dead at his ex-wife’s home in Berkshire. Police said they believed he killed himself but his friends were not so certain, and a coroner recorded an open verdict.

Speaking to the Guardian in 2013, Glushkov said he was sceptical that Berezovsky, who was found hanged in a bathroom, took his own life. “I’m definite Boris was killed. I have quite different information from what is being published in the media,” he said.

He noted that a large number of Russian exiles, including Berezovsky and Alexander Litvinenko, had died under mysterious circumstances. “Boris was strangled. Either he did it himself or with the help of someone. [But] I don’t believe it was suicide,” Glushkov said. “Too many deaths [of Russian emigres] have been happening.”

Glushkov continued to investigate the circumstances surrounding Berezovsky’s death for some months. He conceded that in the period before his friend’s death they had quarrelled. In 2013 Glushkov emailed a friend: “I have a lot of new facts that are of great interest.”

Glushkov has two adult children, Natasha and Dima, and an ex-wife who lives in Moscow. It is understood he had split in recent years from a partner, although they remained on good terms. Natasha is based in the UK.

In 2017, during a trial in absentia in Russia, Glushkov was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing $123m from Aeroflot. The airline pursued the case in London. Glushkov had been defending himself, and told friends he had run out of money to hire lawyers. He was due to attend a hearing at 10.30am on Monday in the Rolls building, London’s commercial court, but failed to show up.

The Met said the next of kin had been informed. “Whilst we believe we know the identity of the deceased, formal identification is yet to take place,” the force said. “The death is currently being treated as an unexplained.”

Holy shit, they are dropping like flies!
 
President Trump told May that the US is with the UK 'all the way'

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President Donald Trump has told British Prime Minister Theresa May that the US is with the UK "all the way" over the poisoning of ex-spy Sergei Skripal and that Russia must provide "unambiguous answers" over the use of nerve agent in the attack, according to a Number 10 spokesperson.

The UK prime minister spoke to the US president on Tuesday about the incident, which has left Skripal and his daughter Yulia critically ill and sent relations between the UK and Russia plummeting.

While May has said it is "highly likely" that the Russian government is behind the nerve gas attack, the White House has been more reticent about attribution. In a press briefing on Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to say whether the US endorsed the UK's view that Russia is responsible or to condemn Russia by name.

"As soon as we get the facts straight, if we agree with them, we will condemn Russia or whoever it may be," Trump said earlier on Tuesday.

A May spokesperson described Tuesday's call in a statement.

"The Prime Minister set out the conclusion reached by the UK Government that it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for the attack against Sergei and Yulia Skripal," according to the statement.

"President Trump said the US was with the UK all the way, agreeing that the Russian Government must provide unambiguous answers as to how this nerve agent came to be used."

The White House echoed this in a statement Tuesday, noting, "President Trump agreed with Prime Minister May that the Government of the Russian Federation must provide unambiguous answers regarding how this chemical weapon, developed in Russia, came to be used in the United Kingdom."

Russia has repeatedly denied any involvement in the attack.

May has set a deadline of midnight UK time on Tuesday for Russia to explain how Novichok nerve agent — a family of poisons developed by Russia during the Cold War — came to be used on Sergei Skripal. Russia says it will not respond to the "ultimatum" unless it is provided with samples of the nerve gas.

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-may-us-uk-russia-all-the-way-sergei-skripal-poisoning-2018-3
 
May Plots to Punish Russia as Crisis Over Poisoned Spy Deepens
Tim Ross, Robert Hutton and Kitty Donaldson | March 13, 2018

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U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May will set out how she aims to retaliate against Russia over the nerve agent attack on a former spy and his daughter, deepening tensions between Vladimir Putin’s regime and the West.

May will meet with her national security and intelligence chiefs Wednesday to assess whether Russia has given a credible answer to her charge that it was behind the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, southwest England. She will then update Parliament on her response.

Putin’s officials rejected May’s ultimatum to account for the attack by midnight Tuesday and warned her there will be repercussions if she acts against Russian media or diplomats based in the London.

The crisis is a key test for May as she navigates Brexit and for the wider Western alliance in how it responds to Putin on the eve of Russian elections. On Tuesday President Donald Trump said he backed her “all the way.” May will set out her next move Wednesday.

‘Stand as an Alliance’

The 66-year-old spied for the U.K. for a decade, beginning while he was working for Russian military intelligence. He was sent to Britain in 2010 in a spy swap. In a state-television documentary released Sunday, Putin said he can never forgive treachery.

The assassination attempt is sensitive for the U.K. because the country has historically been loathe to take substantive measures against Russia for attacks on its soil. Its response to the 2006 murder of Russian Alexander Litvinenko, for instance, was widely derided as toothless.

On Tuesday, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson spoke to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who agreed that the alliance must unite in response, the U.K. said.

“They both agreed that Russian actions repeatedly threaten the security of NATO partners – from the Baltics, Balkans, Ukraine and Georgia – and NATO must stand as an alliance to call out Putin’s behaviour,” the British Foreign Office said. The U.K. will brief the North Atlantic Council on the crisis Wednesday.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-against-russia-over-poisoned-ex-spy-may-says
 
@HomerThompson How come you're not maintaining a mega thread for this event? There are ample interests for the on-going developments I think.
 
@HomerThompson How come you're not maintaining a mega thread for this event? There are ample interests for the on-going developments I think.
You mean as the sticky thread? Honestly, threads that stay in the regular area get more traffic. Also, I noticed you were updating this thread quite nicely over the last 36 hours or so. Staying out of the way is one of the hallmarks of good leadership. :)
 
You mean as the sticky thread? Honestly, threads that stay in the regular area get more traffic. Also, I noticed you were updating this thread quite nicely over the last 36 hours or so. Staying out of the way is one of the hallmarks of good leadership. :)

There are like five different threads on this subject on the first page for some strange reasons.

You should request the Mods to merge them all* into this original thread, then keep your OP/thread title updated so people can follow the newest developments, without checking five different threads. :cool:

(* with the exception to that one duplicated thread that turned out to be a giant circle jerk by salty Hillary voters who met up solely to talk about Trump. That one should go straight to the Dump)
 
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Although the timing is very suspicious, the guy was 69 years old. It could be natural causes.
http://www.businessinsider.com/lond...ikolai-glushkov-was-murdered-2018-3?r=UK&IR=T

The anti-Putin Russian exile who was found dead in London earlier this week was murdered, British police have confirmed.

Nikolai Glushkov, 69, was found dead at his house in southwest London around 10:46 p.m. on Monday. A subsequent pathologist report found that Glushkov died by a "compression to the neck," London's Metropolitan Police said on Friday.

Glushkov was best known for being a close associate of Russian oligarch and prominent Putin critic Boris Berezovsky, who was found dead on the bathroom floor of his ex-wife's house in Ascot, southeast England, in 2013.

Shortly after Berezovsky's death, Glushkov told The Guardian that he was also a target of the Russian government.

He alleged that Berezovsky and Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who was killed in 2006 with polonium poison, had both been on a Kremlin hit-list.

Glushkov said at the time: "I don't see anyone left on it apart from me."
<TheWire1>
 
May is getting played by Putin, not as bad and embarrassingly as Trump, but still likely falling into a trap.
 
Divine intervention. Putin did nothing.
 
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