The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence has declassified a memorandum on the targeted assassinations of political opponents of the illegitimate president of the aggressor country of russia, vladimir putin.
This was reported by Bloomberg.
US intelligence officials have long suspected that some of the mysterious deaths over the years were part of putin's campaign to kill his enemies, the publication writes. But internal US government documents, containing such explicit statements, have not previously emerged.
The two-page document, about which Bloomberg reports, is titled "Kremlin-Ordered Assassinations Abroad Will Probably Persist." A footnote on the first page says that it only examines assassinations abroad that have occurred since putin came to power in 2000.
The assessment says the “first clear case” of putin ordering an assassination abroad occurred in Qatar in 2004, when several russian military intelligence officers were convicted of the murder of Chechen leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, who was designated a terrorist by the United States and the United Nations.
t also mentions the 2006 poisoning of former Soviet spy Alexander Litvinenko in London.
The document says putin’s targets are intelligence defectors or dissidents, such as russian businessman Alexander Perepilichny, who was reportedly killed with a biological toxin in Britain in 2012 shortly before he was due to testify about a Kremlin tax fraud chain.
The report names other individuals putin is believed to have ordered killed, including opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead in Moscow in 2015. It is noted that putin also seeks to eliminate "rebellious separatists in Ukraine", as in the case of Alexander Bednov, who led the "Batman" detachment of the LPR terrorist organization and was killed in 2015.
Political and opposition leaders in former Soviet republics are also under threat, the document says. It mentions the poisoning of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko in 2004. It is assumed that russian intelligence laced his food with dioxin when he was a presidential candidate and advocated for Ukraine's European integration.
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