London Aiming at Putin, Assassination Plot Detailed on Russian TV
February 28, 2012 • 7:40AM

Russia's state-owned First Channel TV, followed by state television Rossiya-1 and other channels, Monday revealed that Ukrainian and Russian security services last month foiled an attempt on the life of Russian Prime Minister Putin. According to testimony of the young men involved in the attack plans, the assassination attempt on Putin was to have been activated immediately after the March 4 Presidential election on Sunday, which Putin is heavily favored to win in the first round.

According to the reports, a January 4 explosion in a house in Odessa, Ukraine led to the discovery of an explosives lab. One person was killed, while others were detained over the weeks that followed, and have given evidence. In an unusual move, Ukrainian security services made two of them available to First Channel to be interviewed.

One arrested participant in the plot, Adam Osmayev, quite recently had been an economics student at the University of Buckingham in the U.K. It was in London, according to his televised interview with First Channel, that he "became interested in explosives." Osmayev had been sought by security forces since 2007 for plotting a bomb attack against Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. According to another participant in the operation, Ilya Pyanzin, the group was flown into Ukraine via the U.A.E. and Turkey, and was headed for Moscow, where they were to undertake attacks on economic facilities, and assassinate Putin. Osmayev told interviewers that his group was experimenting with explosives that could penetrate heavy armor.

Orchestration of the operation is being attributed to Chechen separatist leader Doku Umarov, a key figure in British-linked schemes for a North Caucasus emirate, to secede from Russia. (See "Russia's North Caucasus Republics: Flashpoint for World War," by Denise Henderson and Rachel Douglas, in EIR of September 10, 1999, for a profile of these operations during the Second Chechen War, in connection with Lyndon LaRouche's "Storm over Asia" video on the British-driven destabilization of Eurasia.)

The TV reports showed the locations along Kutuzovsky Prospect in Moscow, along which official motorcades travel, where explosives had already been stashed for the hit. According to First Channel's report, the scheme was only one of several attempts on Putin's life over recent years. Cited in the broadcast were foiled attempts in Azerbaijan in 2001, Kislovodsk (Stavropol Territory, near the North Caucasus) in 2008, and Novgorod in 2009. The First Channel report summarized, "The terrorist war against Russia, which began in the 1990s, continues, despite some successes of our security services, and the extremists openly name their main targets: Vladimin Putin has been number one for them for a long time."

Naturally the international press and Russia's own liberal media promptly mocked the announcement of the assassination attempt as a pre-election stunt. Even western-funded polling agencies such as the Levada Center are projecting a vote of 60 or even 65% for Putin, to win in the first round of the election on March 4.

But British strategists are shameless in proclaiming Putin's prospective Presidency to be illegitimate. London-based exiled Russian zillionaire Boris Berezovsky made headlines yesterday with an interview in Israeli daily Ha'aretz, where he said that Putin will meet the fate of Muammar Qaddafi through a violent revolution. Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, is preparing the Feb. 29 release of a 50-page report on Putin's regime being "corrupted and unreliable," according to their pre-announcement. Some of the British- and U.S. Project Democracy-backed opposition layers are planning mass street actions for immediately after this Sunday's Russian election. As Prof. Igor Panarin drove home in his report to the Schiller Institute conference in Berlin on Feb. 25 (to be published in an upcoming issue of EIR), "London [is] Russia's enemy — its unique historical enemy."

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