E.U. Courtroom Guidelines Russia was Behind 2006 Assassination within the U.Okay.

The European Courtroom of Human Rights dominated on Tuesday that Russia was liable for the 2006 killing of Alexander V. Litvinenko, who was poisoned to demise with a lethal toxin at a London lodge.

The ruling concluded that the assassins have been performing as “brokers of the Russian state,” bolstering a separate inquiry by Britain that discovered “robust circumstantial proof” that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and his spy chief on the time, Nikolai Patrushev, had accredited an operation to kill Mr. Litvinenko, utilizing a extremely poisonous and uncommon isotope, polonium 210.

Mr. Litvinenko was a former colonel within the F.S.B., the home successor to the Soviet-era Okay.G.B., who fled Russia by way of Georgia and Turkey in 2000 to hunt asylum in Britain, the place he grew to become a whistle-blower and a vitriolic critic of Mr. Putin.

He died in November 2006, weeks after ingesting inexperienced tea laced with polonium-210 at London’s Millennium Lodge.

A prolonged British inquiry concluded in 2016 that Andrei Okay. Lugovoi, a former Okay.G.B. bodyguard, and Dmitri V. Kovtun, a Pink Military deserter, poisoned Mr. Litvinenko.

Whereas the 328-page report was scathing, it cited no onerous proof that Mr. Putin or Mr. Patrushev had been conscious of the plot to kill Mr. Litvinenko or had sanctioned it.

Russia has denied any involvement within the homicide of Mr. Litvinenko.