Legion Troll
A fine upstanding poster
Putin has made no secret of his ambition to restore his country to what he sees as its rightful place among the world’s leading nations.
He has invested considerable money and energy into building an image of a strong and morally superior Russia, in sharp contrast with what he portrays as weak, decadent and disorderly Western democracies.
Muckraking journalists, rights advocates, opposition politicians, government whistle-blowers and other Russians who threaten that image are treated harshly — imprisoned on trumped-up charges, smeared in the news media and, with increasing frequency, killed.
Political murders, particularly those accomplished with poisons, are nothing new in Russia, going back five centuries.
Nor are they particularly subtle. While typically not traceable to any individuals and plausibly denied by government officials, poisonings leave little doubt of the state’s involvement — which may be precisely the point.
“Outside of popular culture, there are no highly skilled hit men for hire,” Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University and an authority on the Russian security services, said. “If it’s a skilled job, that means it’s a state asset.”
No other major power employs murder as systematically and ruthlessly as Russia does against those seen as betraying its interests abroad.
Killings outside Russia were given legal sanction by the nation’s Parliament in 2006.
“The government is using the special services to liquidate its enemies,” Gennadi V. Gudkov, a former member of Parliament and onetime lieutenant colonel in the K.G.B., said. “It was not just Litvinenko, but many others we don’t know about, classified as accidents or maybe semi-accidents.”
Most recently, a coroner ruled that blunt-force trauma caused the death of a Kremlin insider, Mikhail Y. Lesin, 57, in a Washington hotel room last year, not the heart attack his colleagues first said.
In July, the Russian Interfax news agency reported that Aleksandr Poteyev, 64, an intelligence officer accused of defecting and betraying a ring of Russian spies living undercover in American suburbs, had died in the United States.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/world/europe/moscow-kremlin-silence-critics-poison.html