From Russia with Blood

The explosive, untold story of how Russia mastered the art and science of targeted assassination

‘A real life thriller, packed with characters that even John le Carré couldn't dream of. If this doesn't scare you, then you're not paying attention.’ Oliver Bullough

They thought they had found a safe haven in the green hills of England. They were wrong. One by one, the Russian oligarchs, dissidents, and gangsters who fled to Britain after Vladimir Putin came to power dropped dead in strange or suspicious circumstances. One by one, their British lawyers and fixers met similarly grisly ends. Yet, one by one, the British authorities shut down every investigation-and carried on courting the Kremlin.

In From Russia With Blood, multi-award-winning investigative journalist Heidi Blake unflinchingly documents the growing web of Russian-linked deaths on British and American soil, tracking the men who lived and died in the Kremlin’s crosshairs from London’s high-end night clubs to Miami’s million-dollar hideouts, and following a trail of increasingly savage attacks onto the streets of Salisbury, where the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal was poisoned with a deadly nerve agent in 2018.

Working with bags of crime scene evidence, hundreds of thousands of pages of exclusive documents, surveillance footage, classified intelligence briefings, forensically restored phones and computers, and hundreds of insider interviews, Blake bravely exposes how Russia’s killing campaign fits into Putin’s pursuit of global dominance – and why Western governments have failed time and again to stop the bloodshed.

This heart-stopping international investigation – written with the page-turning pace and chilling narrative of a thriller – reveals one of the most important and terrifying stories of our time.

About the author

Heidi Blake is an investigative journalist at BuzzFeed News. She has won more than twenty national and international media awards, and her team’s investigation into Russian assassinations in the West was named a Pulitzer finalist in 2018. Blake was previously assistant editor of the Sunday Times, where her work on corruption at FIFA helped bring down FIFA president Sepp Blatter, and she is the coauthor of The Ugly Game: The Corruption of FIFA and the Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup.