Anne Applebaum in Slate:
[T]hough it's doubtful that he ever gave an actual order to an actual thug, in this deeper sense, Putin is certainly responsible for Litvinenko's death: He presides over this web of old intelligence operatives; indeed he sits at its hub. And he approves of their methods. One of his first acts as prime minister in 1999 was the unveiling of a plaque to Yuri Andropov, the former KGB boss best known for his harsh treatment of dissidents. Last year, Russians built a statue to Andropov. No one should have been surprised when the former KGB's harassment of modern "dissidents" subsequently grew harsher with every passing year—or that it culminated in this strange murder.
Andropov presided over another infamous murder of an Eastern dissident living in London — the so-called "Umbrella Murder" of Bulgarian playwright Georgi Markov, who was injected with a ricin pellet, discharged from an umbrella point, on his way to a BBC Radio broadcast in 1978. Three days later, he fell dead from a fever. The killer was a Dane agent of Italian extraction called Francesco Giullino, recruited by by the KGB equivalent under the regime of Bulgarian dictator Todor Zhivkov. The mystery took close to thirty years to solve, and was only done so by virtue of the release of Soviet-era archives.
What are the odds dossiers on Litvinenko still exist in the age of globalized e-commerce assassinations?