Flight from Russia.(Russian petroleum industry)

WHEN Alexander Litvinenko was asked on his deathbed who was behind his poisoning, he fingered Vladimir Putin. While the dots linking Putin to the polonium poisoning will probably never be connected, Litvinenko's death is part of a pattern. Political opponents of Putin have had a terrible sequence of unfortunate events.

While Russia liberalized effectively under Boris Yeltsin, it began to head south in earnest on July 2, 2003, when Moscow police arrested Platon Lebedev, a principal shareholder in a holding company that was the majority owner of oil giant Yukos. On October 25 of that same year, Russian security agents arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky and placed him in prison. Khodorkovsky, who was outspoken politically, was ultimately put in a Siberian prison with a nine-year sentence. Yukos is now controlled by a Putin crony.

Lebedev and Khodorkovsky were hardly the only opponents of Putin to have a run of bad luck. Heroic journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot before she could get to the bottom of what appears to be a terrible scandal involving the Russian handling of Chechnya. Pro-Western Ukrainian leader Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin (and survived). Litvinenko's compatriot Dmitri Kovtun now also seems to have been poisoned.

While these human tragedies have played out, Russia has also behaved poorly toward Western multinationals. My colleague Leon Aron reported recently that "the Kremlin halted or threatened to halt operations" by a series of companies including Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, and Total. Aron adds that "it is an open secret in Moscow that the government's prime motive is to pressure the companies into either surrendering a share of ...