Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko

“The Litvinenko case was used by previous Labour government to put the anglo-Russian relation into the deep freeze and that was very bad”, Kawczynski told RIA Novosti in an interview.

A British inquest set to be released on January 21 is expected to conclude that Russia was behind the 2006 murder of the former Russian spy Aleksandr Litvinenko.

Retired High Court judge Sir Robert Owen chaired a public inquiry past year so he could fully investigate claims that the Kremlin had ordered the killing.

Moscow has declined to take part in proceedings as have Andrei Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun, the two Russian men Britain accuses of actually carrying out the murder.

The one-time KGB agent who became a critic of Putin, died in 2006 after drinking green tea poisoned with radioactive polonium-210.

Bloomberg reported that Litvinenko was a former Russian intelligence whistleblower who later worked for the British MI6 after fleeing his home country.

It was believed that Litvinenko was poisoned twice, as per lawyer Robin Tam. They confirmed meeting with Litvinenko in London on several occasions, including at the time of the suspected poisoning, but deny any involvement in his death. In 2007, British prosecutors said that Lugovoi and Kovtun should be charged with murder. “The Foreign Office is eager to avoid a full blown row partly because Putin’s cooperation is badly needed to create a unified front against Islamic State in Syria”, wrote reporters Patrick Wintour and Luke Harding.

Officials who conducted the autopsy into the killing also recommended the inquiry so that some testimony could be provided in secret. He had accused the Russian government of involvement in a series of apartment building explosions in 1999 that were blamed on Chechen rebels, and alleged links between senior Kremlin figures and organized crime. Before he died, he said that Putin was responsible for the death of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.