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MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin has taken off the diplomatic gloves and contemptuously dismissed murdered former intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko as insignificant, claiming that the dead man knew no secrets.
Addressing more than 1000 journalists in the Kremlin during his annual press conference, Mr Putin made his first public comments about a man who allegedly accused the Russian leader of his own murder in a dramatic deathbed statement hours before he died.
Litvinenko's friends in London allege that he was poisoned on the Kremlin's orders with radioactive Polonium-210 as a horrific form of retribution for his outspoken criticism of Mr Putin.
Until now, the Russian leader has confined himself to denying Moscow's role in the unsolved November killing and to expressing his condolences.
But yesterday he put such diplomatic niceties aside publicly, rubbishing the late man's character in a statement calculated to convince the world that the Kremlin considered Litvinenko 'small fry' and could not therefore have ordered his murder.
"He didn't know any secrets," insisted Putin.
"Before being fired from the Federal Security Service (the equivalent of MI5) Alexander Litvinenko served in the convoy troops and had no access to state secrets."
Mr Putin went on to paint a picture of a man who had tried to exaggerate his own importance and who was regarded as a loser when he lived in Russia.
"He (Litvinenko) was prosecuted for abuse of power, in particular for beating up detainees when he was a security officer, and for stealing explosives."
Mr Putin also tried to debunk the idea that the late man was forced to flee to Britain in 2000 in fear of his life.
"As far as I know he received a three-year suspended sentence so there was no need for him to flee. He had said all the negative things he could say about his (FSB) service so there could not be anything new in his actions."
In life, Mr Litvinenko's greatest act of defiance was to publish a book in which he alleged that the FSB had masterminded a bombing campaign of Russian apartment blocks to create a convenient pretext to launch the Second Chechen War in 1999.
He also accused his former colleagues of plotting to assassinate Mr Putin's political enemies.
But if Mr Putin has been rattled by the international row surrounding his death, he did not show it.
Yesterday he boasted that his own government was so solid that it could afford to look at such scandals in a detached fashion "from above." The Kremlin leader said it was up to investigators to find out what was really behind Litvinenko's murder.
In the UK the Crown Prosecution Service is currently considering whether there is enough evidence to press charges against anyone.
Over the course of more than three and a half hours, Mr Putin also found time to hit out at "ill-wishers" whom he accused of trying to portray Russia as using its vast energy resources to bully its neighbours.
Last year Russia was accused of bullying Ukraine over gas prices; this year it was alleged to have blackmailed Belarus on the same issue.
But Mr Putin said it was purely a matter of getting 'market prices' and of breaking away from the old system of subsidising former Soviet republics.
"For fifteen years we subsidised these countries at huge expense. Why should we?"
In comments likely to alarm some in the West, he added however that an Iranian proposal to form a gas Opec was "interesting" and was being considered.
Russia's old Cold War foe, Washington, also came in for sharp criticism.
Mr Putin said he was deeply unhappy about US plans to install elements of an advanced missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic, too close to Russia's borders for his liking.
The idea that such a system would help counter the threat of Iran and international terrorism was, he said, unfounded.
- INDEPENDENT
