A Pool of Blood - Political Murders and Assassination Attempts in Putin’s Russia - Boris Ivanovich

A trail of blood runs through the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

Journalists murdered in Moscow and the Russian provinces. Political opponents gunned down. Defectors hunted abroad. Critics suddenly struck by mysterious illnesses. Radioactive polonium in London. Novichok in Salisbury. Bombs, bullets and poison. And behind case after case, the same disturbing question:

Who wanted them dead?

A Pool of Blood investigates more than two decades of political murders, attempted assassinations, poisonings and suspicious deaths connected with Putin’s Russia.

Beginning in 2000, the book follows the cases of journalists whose investigations made them powerful enemies, opposition figures who challenged the Kremlin, former intelligence officers and defectors, human-rights activists, Chechen opponents, military figures and others who found themselves caught in the shadowy world where politics, organized crime, intelligence operations and violence intersect.

Some of the names became known throughout the world: Anna Politkovskaya, Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Nemtsov, Sergei Skripal and Alexei Navalny.

Others have largely been forgotten.

Yet their stories are no less remarkable.

From Moscow and the North Caucasus to Kyiv, London, Berlin, Vienna, Sofia and the Spanish Mediterranean coast, A Pool of Blood reconstructs the attacks, the investigations and the search for those responsible. It examines contract killings, mysterious poisonings, alleged intelligence operations and assassination plots-including cases in which the intended victim survived and investigators were able to uncover traces that a successful murder might have erased forever.

But this book does not begin with a predetermined conclusion.

Not every murder examined here can be attributed to the Kremlin. Not every suspicious death has been proved to be an assassination. In some cases, the killers were convicted while those who allegedly ordered the crime escaped judgment. In others, courts, governments, intelligence agencies or investigative journalists uncovered evidence pointing towards Russian state institutions. And some cases remain mysteries to this day.

A Pool of Blood carefully distinguishes between what is known, what has been alleged and what remains unproven.

Taken together, these cases tell a disturbing history of Russia under Vladimir Putin-and of a phenomenon that increasingly crossed Russia’s borders. What begins with murdered journalists in Russian cities gradually expands into a story of defectors, dissidents and suspected intelligence operations across Europe.

Some were killed.
Some survived.
Some cases were solved.
Many remain unanswered.

A Pool of Blood is the story of those cases-and of the long, often elusive search for the people behind the killers.