Andrei Lugovoy

When Russian President Vladimir Putin knelt on the pavement in Moscow’s Red Square to kiss the tummy of five-year-old Nikita Konkin in 2006, the encounter led to a bizarre twist of events.

“I wasn’t ticklish at all,” said the boy who claims that he felt so proud that he didn’t wash his stomache afterwards. “I felt something good.”

President Vladimir Putin probably approved a Russian intelligence operation to murder ex-KBG agent Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium-210, a British inquiry into the 2006 killing in London concluded. 

Litvinenko, 43, an outspoken critic of Putin who fled Russia, died after drinking green tea laced with the rare radioactive isotope at London's Millennium Hotel. 

The Russian state must have been involved in the 2006 poisoning of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko with a radioactive isotope, which amounted to "a nuclear attack on the streets" of London, an inquiry into the death was told on July 30.