From Russia with Blood

September 23, 2019
Russian president Vladimir Putin has enjoyed the British government’s “quiet complicity” in a “covert killing campaign” against his exiled enemies and their associates, according to this sensationalistic account by BuzzFeed News editor Blake (The Ugly Game). At the center of her tale are Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky and his Scottish “bagman,” Scot Young. Berezovsky, who sought political asylum in England after helping to bring Putin to power, was found hanged in March 2013. Less than two years later, Young’s body was discovered impaled on a fence beneath his London apartment. Investigators ruled out foul play in both cases, but Blake suggests that the two men were killed in retaliation for their involvement in a Moscow real estate deal. Citing unnamed U.S. intelligence sources, she identifies 12 other “suspicious” deaths from the past 15 years, alleging that authorities prematurely closed these cases in order to keep Russian money flowing into the U.K. Though Blake claims to have gathered “hundreds of boxes of documents” and a “huge cache of digital files,” she doesn’t cite any specific evidence to explain how these alleged assassinations were carried out. Readers will have to set their skepticism aside in order to enjoy this cinematic ride.

October 1, 2019
The global investigations editor at BuzzFeed News examines "Kremlin-sanctioned killing around the world." British journalist Blake (co-author: The Ugly Game: The Corruption of FIFA and the Qatari Plot To Buy the World Cup, 2015) builds on a June 2017 BuzzFeed News exposé to delineate how Vladimir Putin and his Russian assassins have murdered political opponents over the years. Some of the killings occurred within Russia, but the author focuses on the assassinations of dissidents who escaped from Russia to the U.K. To a lesser extent, Blake also discusses those who fled to the United States. To assist readers in understanding the context of each death, Blake provides detailed explanations of why world leaders--including Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama--believed Putin might liberalize Russian society and become an ally of democratic nations. That severe misreading led the British and U.S. leaders to deemphasize the significance of the assassinations ordered by Putin. Along with her BuzzFeed colleagues, Blake accuses the British and U.S. governments of coverups, which have taken various forms--e.g., labeling murders as suicides, withholding gory details of the deaths, and conducting desultory law enforcement inquiries so that journalists would feel discouraged about publishing information that might agitate their readers. Blake explores the highly publicized murder of Russian reporter Anna Politkovskaya, but that case is an outlier in a narrative filled with foreshadowing about which dissident will be killed next. As the author shows, the 2006 death of Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko not only eliminated a high-profile Putin opponent; it also showed "Putin to be just as brutal as his critics claimed, and finally the world was listening." The most thoroughly documented case is the death of Boris Berezovsky, a wealthy Russian exile who delighted in taunting Putin from afar. Though well-researched, the narrative sometimes bogs down in the author's discussions of Russian and British politics. When Blake focuses on the circumstances surrounding the murders, the narrative moves more smoothly. An uneven but still useful documentation of the disturbing reach of a dangerous world leader.

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Starred review from November 1, 2019

Investigative journalist Blake (coauthor, The Ugly Game) sheds insight into former spies in Russia and England, who die mysteriously in various countries, including the United States. Blake, a London-based Global Investigative editor for BuzzFeed News, noticed these strange deaths in England, and began her own inquiries. The impetus was when former double agent Sergei Skripal came down with a mysterious illness in 2018 that nearly killed him and his daughter. Blake explains how Skripal's poisoning from a nerve agent planted by Russian nationals was the first chemical weapons attack in Europe since World War II. The author's brave foray into this dangerous scenario is the reason much of this information is known. She covers the entire trail, including details on how enemies of the Kremlin end up missing or dead; much insight was gained through firsthand interviews with subjects involved. VERDICT Fans of Blake's work, along with readers curious about spymasters across the globe and the ways in which Russia tries to infiltrate other governments, will be astonished at the level of detail provided here.--Jason L. Steagall, Arapahoe Libs., Centennial, Colorado

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2019
Recently, a dozen-plus Russian exiles have died under suspicious circumstances in Great Britain. The UK accused Russia of the 2006 death of one, Alexander Litvinenko, and of attempting but failing to kill another, Sergei Skripal, in 2018. Diplomatic furor erupted in each case, but British officialdom has closed the books on the other deaths. This provokes the curiosity of Blake, a Buzzfeed News reporter. She looks back to Russia's upheaval in the 1990s, when oligarch Boris Berezovsky promoted an obscure ex-KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, to succeed then-president Boris Yeltsin. This proved to be a monumental mistake as Putin turned against Berezovsky and other oligarchs. Berezovsky fled to Britain, where he denounced Putin. Later, Blake reports, Berezovsky's lawyers died abruptly, followed by his associate Litvinenko. The latter, Blake suggests, might have become a Putin target because he was a former intelligence officer who became a defector (a traitor, from the Putin viewpoint) who had been investigating Putin's possible connections to organized crime. Berezovsky died in 2013, allegedly by suicide. With fulsome forensic descriptions, Blake's investigation will captivate Russia watchers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)