Marina Litvinenko says 'West should have been alarmed many years ago' over Putin's Ukraine war

The widowed wife of former Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko believes the West “should have been alarmed many years ago” as Vladimir Putin continues his vicious assault on Ukraine.

Mr Litvinenko, a prominent Putin critic, was poisoned in London in 2006 with an inquiry in 2016 concluding that the Russian Federal Security Service was responsible and “probably” acting under orders from Putin.

And while the West has hit back at Russia with a raft of heavy sanctions, Ms Litvinenko has told GB News that more should have been done to prevent such an attack, while adding that it could now be too late as missiles continue to rain down on Ukraine.

“On 2006, I would like to remind you. It wasn’t simply my husband that was killed”, she told Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster.

“And we already started to talk about nuclear terrorism in central London. But reaction, yes it was some reaction, but not strong reactions and it was not the West united against Putin for doing this and after that we received another chemical attack in London in 2018 when Skripal was poisoned.

“And what else, there was some kind of reaction, bigger than 2006 but still not enough.

“It was still business as usual, there was still communication between the Russian and British saying we need to save this relationship because Russian people would have suffered. And now what we have in 2022 a war.

“Now Ukrainian people suffer because bombs are hitting their houses, their cities and they have to escape to save their children.

“They should have been alarmed many years ago, in 1999 when an apartment was bombed in Moscow just before Putin took charge of Russia. These people are capable of anything, and my husband published a book about this with a lot of evidence, but people tried to calculate this and speculate. But sometimes it looks like it’s too late, it’s not just apartments now, its cities.”