That's a bit dodgy of you. Presumption of innocence is obviously used colloquially here. About Politkovskaya and Litvinenko: The version about Politkovskaya m

That's a bit dodgy of you. Presumption of innocence is obviously used colloquially here. About Politkovskaya and Litvinenko: The version about Politkovskaya murder I find the most plausible is that her murder is linked with Putin's ally and appointed president of Chechnya Kadyrov. Before her death she was working on human rights violations in Chechnya, including torture. In fact, you can still find her last interview about it on Novaya Gazeta (newspaper she worked for) website, dated 9th October of 2006. What Russian government did here is covering Kadyrov and finding scapegoats who are supposed to represent Chechen 'terrorists' (opposed to Kadyrov and Russian govt). Torture committed by federal and local pro-Russian forces is still a reality in North Caucasus, just about a year ago there was a story on it in 170 thousands readers strong Russian Reporter Magazine. Western press didn't seem to give due attention to the cause Politkovskaya died for, instead preferring, as usual, to focus on apparently more important issues such as gay people forbidden to proclaim their sexuality in public. At least no one has died over that story yet. Litvinenko case is a weird one. So he is some sort of whistleblower who apparently disclosed Putin's inside job and had to die due to Polonium poisoning. The story goes like this: Litvinenko has disclosed Putin's inside job (which most likely isn't an inside job, basically it's a Russian equivalent of 9/11-as-an-inside-job story), so FSB had to make him painfully die almost in a Sicilian mafia fashion. I am not a Western layman so I don't automatically deem crazy everyone who happened to be in power and at the same time to the East from certain meridian. I see why Sicilian mafia would kill somebody after the fact: it doesn't care much about publicity and it doesn't want to be betrayed once again. But I don't see why would Putin do that, he deeply cares about his perception in the West (as long as it doesn't meddle with his authoritative pretensions and support of his electorate) and he doesn't often blow up houses (if at all). Since the word already spread and you could buy a book in Putin-blows-up-houses genre in any Russian kiosk that sells cigarettes, yellow rags and pulp fiction, killing the man responsible for that in such a bizarre fashion (poisoning someone with radioactive materiel is in the same basket with feeding someone to their pet bear, between two shots of vodka, saying 'Na zdorovje, tovarishchi') is acknowledgement of guilt. Tldr if Putin did kill Litvinenko, it was the most stupid thing he did in his entire career.