The name of Sergei Lysiuk, the former head of Russia’s Interior Ministry special forces, who now runs the Vityaz training centre, features prominently in Alexander Litvinenko’s book Blowing Up Russia.

In the book Litvinenko accuses the FSB of being behind bombings in Moscow apartment buildings in September 1999 that killed 300 people.

Vladimir Putin, then Prime Minister, blamed Chechen terrorists and ordered the Russian Army into Chechnya soon after. Litvinenko described Mr Lysiuk as one of the Kremlin’s most trusted officers who was “the founder and first commander of the Vityaz interior forces’ special operations unit”.

As the founder of the Vityaz brigade, Mr Lysiuk created the tradition of the maroon beret as a mark of the Interior Ministry’s most elite special forces.

The author claimed that he worked closely with the FSB after retiring to set up his own Vityaz company. Litvinenko described Mr Lysiuk as a secret KGB agent controlled by the head of Russia’s military counter-intelligence unit. He went on in the book: “Operational information indicates that the commercial activities of Lysiuk’s firm included training contract killers . . . but Lysiuk himself might not have known anything about that.”

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