Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Mr. Putin's World

Obama continues with his strange public approach to Russia. Putin is not a 21st Century man. Russia is a "regional power." Obama is more concerned with the apocalypse.
Here are some things about Putin's world collected from some admittedly biased Internet sites:

Less than four months after Putin took over at the KGB, opposition Duma Deputy Galina Starovoitova, the most prominent pro-democracy Kremlin critic in the nation, was murdered at her apartment building in St. Petersburg. NYT: "Initial evidence suggests that the killing was a political assassination."
Russian Attorney General, Yury Skuratov, who was investigating high-level corruption in the Kremlin, was neutralized when an illicit sex video involving Skuratov was aired on national TV.
In September 1999 an apartment building in the Pechatniki neighborhood of Moscow was blown up by a bomb. 94 were killed. Less than a week later a second bomb destroyed a building in Moscow’s Kashirskoye neighborhood. That bomb killed 118. The bombings caused the Russian Federation to launch the Second Chechen War. On October 1st, Putin declares Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov and his parliament illegitimate and Russian forces invaded. (Sound familiar?) Russia was ultimately convicted of human rights violations before the European Court for Human Rights. There have always been accusations that the apartment bombings were a "false flag" operation but there is no such evidence.
An independent public commission on the Moscow bombings was rendered ineffective because of government refusal to respond to its inquiries. The so-called “Kovalev Commission” was formed to informally investigate charges that Putin’s KGB had planted the Pechatniki and Kashirskoye apartment bombs. Sergei Yushenkov, vice-chair of the group and co-chairman of the Liberal Russia political party was gunned down at the entrance of his Moscow apartment block. Another Commission member, Yuri Shchekochikhin died of poisoning. A third was severely beaten by thugs. The Commission’s lawyer, Mikhail Trepashkin was jailed after a secret trial on espionage charges.
In 2000, reporters Igor Domnikov, Sergey Novikov, Iskandar Khatloni, Sergey Ivanov and Adam Tepsurgayev were murdered --in assassinations at home in Russia. 130 journalists have died violently since Putin came to power, not including journalists killed in Chechnya.
Yuri Shchekochikhin, a vocal opposition journalist and member of the Russian Duma and the Kovalev Commission, suddenly contracted a mysterious illness. In London a tentative diagnosis (made on smuggled biopsy tissue) was made of poisoning with thallium.
Nikolai Girenko, a prominent human rights defender, Professor of Ethnology and expert on racism and discrimination in the Russian Federation was shot dead in his home in St Petersburg.
Paul Klebnikov , the editor of the Russian edition Forbes magazine who was working on a money laundering story, was shot and killed in Moscow.
Viktor Yushchenko, anti-Russian candidate for the presidency of the Ukraine, was poisoned by Dioxin. (He survived.)
Andrei Kozlov, First Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Central Bank and another interested in money laundering, was shot and killed in Moscow.
Anna Politkovskaya, author of books and articles on Russian human rights violations in Chechnya and who attacked Putin as a dictator, was shot and killed at her home in Moscow. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum wrote that the only possible motive was political.
Alexander Litvinenko, a KGB defector and author of the book "Blowing up Russia," which accuses the Kremlin of masterminding the Pechatniki and Kashirskoye bombings in order to blame Chechen terrorists and justify an invasion of Chechnya, was fatally poisoned by radioactive Polonium identified as from Russian sources.
In January 19, 2009, Russian human rights attorney Stanslav Markelo was shot in the back of the head with a silenced pistol as he left a press conference at which he announced his intention to sue the Russian government for its early release of the Col. Yuri Budanov, who murdered his 18-year-old client in Chechnya five years earlier.
On July 14, 2009, leading Russian human rights journalist and activist Natalia Estemirove, viewed as the successor to Anna Politkovskaya, was abducted in front of her home in Grozny, Chechnya, taken across the border, shot and dumped in a roadside gutter.

Putin is not directly linked to any of these events but the victims were very public people and they were killed in public places or in a very public way. This kind of brutal, homicidal, intimidating culture is not typical of any century, it is typical of our brutal and violent nature unrestrained, and as such is typical of all centuries. Contrary to Mr. Obama's claims, we have not outgrown it, matured beyond it or experienced any species-changing revelation. Putin is part of what we are and must constantly guard against. And leadership is necessary to do it.

A last word from Anne Appelbaum: “As Russian (and Eastern European) history well demonstrates, it isn’t always necessary to kill millions of people to frighten all the others: A few choice assassinations, in the right time and place, usually suffice. Since the arrest of oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003, no other Russian oligarchs have attempted even to sound politically independent. After the assassination of Politkovskaya on Saturday, it’s hard to imagine many Russian journalists following in her footsteps to Grozny either.”

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