His team alleges he was poisoned on the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin denies any involvement.
The President is elected in a two-round system every six years, with a two consecutive term limitation. If no candidate wins by an absolute majority in the first round, a second election round is held between two candidates with the most votes. The last presidential election was in 2018, and the next is in 2024.
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Chapter 5. The Federal Assembly
Article 94
The Federal Assembly - the parliament of the Russian Federation - shall be the representative and legislative body of the Russian Federation.
Article 95
1. The Federal Assembly consists of two chambers - the Council of the Federation and the State Duma.
Putin was born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and studied law at Leningrad State University, graduating in 1975. Putin worked as a KGB foreign intelligence officer for 16 years, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, before resigning in 1991 to begin a political career in Saint Petersburg.
Alexander Litvinenko was a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and KGB. After speaking critically about what he saw as corruption within the Russian government, he fled retribution to the UK, where he remained a vocal critic of the Russian state. Six years after fleeing, he was poisoned by two Russians in a suspected assassination.
On 1 November 2006, Litvinenko suddenly fell ill and was hospitalized. He died three weeks later, becoming the first confirmed victim of lethal polonium-210-induced acute radiation syndrome.[1] Litvinenko's allegations about misdeeds of the FSB and his public deathbed accusations that Russian president Vladimir Putin was behind his unusual malady resulted in worldwide media coverage.
Dmitry Kovtun had been speaking openly about the plan to kill Litvinenko that was intended to "set an example" as a punishment for a "traitor".[4] The main suspect in the case, a former officer of the Russian Federal Protective Service (FSO), Andrey Lugovoy, remains in Russia.
Media lies, It just escalated situation with Iran.
U.S. officials justified the Soleimani strike claiming it was necessary to stop an "imminent attack", though later clarifying the legal justification of the action as being taken "in response to an escalating series of attacks...to protect United States personnel, to deter Iran from conducting or supporting further ...
Territorial integrity is the principle under international law that prohibits states from the use of force against the "territorial integrity or political independence" of another state. It is enshrined in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and has been recognized as customary international law.
In a report released on Tuesday, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Agnes Callamard claimed the US drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani and nine others violated international law.
Germany is under pressure to abandon a giant gas pipeline from Russia after Putin's government was accused of poisoning Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny
- Angela Merkel is under pressure to abandon a giant gas pipeline from being built from Russia to Germany.
- It comes after members of her party openly accused Vladimir Putin's government of poisoning Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
US and EU expel Russian diplomats over UK poisoning
2018
US and EU expel Russian diplomats over UK poisoning
he Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny is merely the latest Kremlin critic suspected to have been poisoned in murky circumstances. Over the past century a series of political opponents have fallen mysteriously ill. Many have died. All have seemingly been victims of Moscow’s secret poisons laboratory, set up by Vladimir Lenin in 1921.
Its function was to deal efficiently and mercilessly with enemies of the state. Some were domestic, others troublesome exiles. According to Stalin’s former spy chief Pavel Sudoplatov, the KGB concluded long ago that poison was the best method for eliminating unwanted individuals. The KGB’s modern successor – the FSB – appears to share this view.
During the cold war, the KGB exterminated its adversaries in ingenious ways. In 1959 an assassin killed the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera using a cyanide spray pistol hidden in a newspaper. In 1979 another hitman murdered the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov as he waited for a bus on Waterloo Bridge in London. The weapon: a poison-tipped umbrel
Who is Alexei Navalny?
Revealed: The Moscow weapons lab that made the deadly Novichok nerve agent
Novichok, Feared Soviet-Designed Poison
he Soviet-designed nerve agent Novichok that Germany says poisoned
Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny is a military-grade toxin
banned as a chemical weapon after it was used in a previous attack in
Britain.
The newest class of nerve agent, the Novichok family of toxins was
developed by the Soviet government towards the end of the Cold War.
The Chemical Weapons Convention has resulted in the destruction 97% of
the world’s known stockpiles of chemical weapons. In 2013, the OPCW won
the Nobel Peace Prize for its work, but Syria’s use of chemical weapons
against its own people — and Russia’s support for the Syrian government —
have put the treaty under severe pressure in recent years.
Syria's chemical warefare.....................................
The Chemical Weapons Convention has resulted in the destruction 97% of the world’s known stockpiles of chemical weapons. In 2013, the OPCW won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work, but Syria’s use of chemical weapons against its own people — and Russia’s support for the Syrian government — have put the treaty under severe pressure in recent years.
In the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin, exotic murders stopped, at a time of cooperation between Russia and the west. Once Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, however, political killings stealthily resumed. There was speculation that the poisons factory – identified as a squat, gloomy, beige research building on the outskirts of Moscow – was back in business.
Possible victims included Roman Tsepov, Putin’s bodyguard in 1990s St Petersburg, who died after drinking tea in 2004 at a local FSB office. The same year, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya fell ill on a domestic flight to Rostov, losing consciousness after sipping tea on the plane. She survived. Two years later a gunman murdered Politkovskaya outside her Moscow flat.
The most notorious poisoning of the century took place weeks later. The target this time was Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer turned vehement Putin critic. Two Moscow assassins – Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi – met Litvinenko at the Millennium hotel in London. He swallowed a few sips of green tea laced with radioactive polonium, dying three weeks later.
The murder led to a long and acrimonious period in British-Russian relations. It also threw up a grim question: whether Putin signed off on state hits, or merely set broad policy parameters for his spy chiefs to interpret. A 2016 public inquiry in the UK ruled Putin had “probably” approved the operation, together with the then head of the FSB. Some government evidence remains secret.
In March 2018, another pair of Kremlin hitmen flew into London from Moscow, in much the same way Kovtun and Lugovoi had done 12 years earlier. Their target was Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent who had spied for MI6. The assassins were colonels in Russian military intelligence, working undercover: Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin.
According to the British government, Mishkin and Chepiga applied a Soviet-era nerve agent – novichok – to the front door handle of Skripal’s home in Salisbury. He and his daughter, Yulia, collapsed hours later on a city centre bench. They survived but another woman, Dawn Sturgess, died two months later after spraying novichok on her wrists. The UK and its allies expelled more than 150 embassy-based Russian spies.
Evidence of Putin’s personal involvement in poisonings remains circumstantial. We do not know how much he knows or the chain of command. But the large number of victims, at home and abroad, suggests the Kremlin views such episodes as an unpleasant but necessary evil. They send a message to society. It says that dissent has its limits, and that unbridled opposition to the state may carry a terrible price.
Russia's Saratov army base is a time bomb containing around one-and-a-half-thousand tonnes of dangerously deteriorating chemical weapons. Russia inherited 40-thousand tonnes of chemical weapons from the Soviet Union which, under international accords, must be destroyed. This is the changing of the guard at Russia's Saratov army base, 700 kilometers (440 miles) south-east of Moscow.
