The apparent London murder of former Russian secret agent Alexander Litvinenko with a radioactive substance and the suspected poisoning of former Russian Premier Yegor Gaidar have caused many to point the finger of blame at President Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB chief. Ukraine’s president, the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko survived a poisoning during his successful election campaign. In 1977 the KGB murdered Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in London, injecting a tiny pellet full of a fungal poison into his leg, with the tip of an umbrella.

Russian governments therefore have “form”, but why would they have really wanted to kill Litvinenko? His claims that the FSB were behind the 1999 Moscow apartment block bombing and the murder of campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya this year may have annoyed the Kremlin and its spy chiefs, but they were neither new, nor unique to Litvinenko. In 1998 when he was an FSB lieutenant colonel investigating organized crime, Litvinenko was arrested for alleging an official plot to murder the magnate Boris Berezovsky. Acquitted and released after 18 months, he moved to London. Did Litvinenko take a stash of FSB secrets with him, which perhaps included embarrassing details of the Kremlin’s effective seizure of the Yukos oil company from another Yeltsin-era magnate, Mikhail Khorodovsky? The main threads to Litvinenko’s anti-Putin campaign were Chechnya, Russia’s oil and gas and the steady clampdown on media freedom.

Though Europe cares little about Chechnya, energy is another matter entirely. The Kremlin’s increasingly aggressive political use of Russian gas supplies has seriously alarmed Western Europe. The sudden suspension of gas deliveries to the Ukraine hit Europe as well, breaking Moscow’s contractual obligations. The way in which state-owned Russian energy companies are circling European oil and gas assets is viewed with considerable unease. The attractive promise of abundant energy on Europe’s doorstep is turning sour. European states are casting around for alternative supplies, particularly from the Middle East and North Africa. Could Litvinenko really have still had important information on Russian energy after eight years out of the FSB? It seems unlikely. So was his murder a warning to others who might have such data or merely delayed revenge for his perceived treachery? Litvinenko’s death clearly caused Putin political embarrassment at a EU summit last week in Helsinki. He was there to drive home Russia’s key energy supply role but ended up having to deny he was complicit in murder. The radiation trail of polonium-210, which leads back to Moscow, could mean that this was a covert operation that was seriously bungled. It could however also mean that it was not an official FSB operation at all. There are powerful forces at work in Russia, in the underworld and on the nationalist political extreme. Even within the Kremlin, in the FSB and military, some think Putin too soft and cautious. It would suit them all to force their president angrily into a more aggressive stance toward the outside world and allow them to broaden their own power bases.