In November 2006, a former Russian spy died in a London hospital after drinking tea laced with polonium-210, a rare radioactive poison. Alexander Litvinenko, who had fled Russia and been granted asylum in Britain, had accused the FSB and President Vladimir Putin of corruption and murder. His slow and agonising death, and the trail of radiation left across London, turned a poisoning into an international crisis. This Real Stories crime documentary reconstructs how the KGB’s successor services are alleged to have carried out an assassination in the heart of a foreign capital.
The film follows the investigation step by step: the meeting at a Millennium Hotel in Mayfair, the two Russian men accused of the killing, the radioactive traces found in hotels, offices, bars and aircraft, and the long delay before the cause of Litvinenko’s illness was identified. It draws on interviews with detectives, scientists, journalists and Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, who fought for a public inquiry into her husband’s death. The inquiry later concluded that the Russian state was probably responsible.
This documentary matters because the Litvinenko case became a landmark in the story of Russian assassinations abroad. It shows how a Cold War tactic, the quiet murder of a defector, returned in the twenty-first century, and why the case still shapes British-Russian relations today.