The Crown Prosecution Service accused Kovtun as being the second suspect of murdering Alexander Litvinenko based on the discovery of new evidence in 2011 and requested his extradition to England to stand trial in February 2012.

[2] In March 2015, Kovtun appeared on BBC News at Ten offering to give evidence, from Russia by video-link, to the enquiry into Litvinenko's death.

He said he had "heard a lot of statements which are easy to refute" and by participating he could "get access to the documents – including the secret material – so I can make my own conclusions".

[7] In 2021 the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg found beyond reasonable doubt that Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun killed Litvinenko.

[8] On 9 January 2017, under the Magnitsky Act, the United States Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control updated its Specially Designated Nationals List and blacklisted Aleksandr I. Bastrykin, Andrei K. Lugovoi, Dmitri V. Kovtun, Stanislav Gordievsky, and Gennady Plaksin, which froze any of their assets held by American financial institutions or transactions with those institutions and banned their travelling to the United States.