Политический контекст

Убийства в эпоху Путина

Since Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin took office as President of the Russian Federation, more than 200 journalists and political opponents of his regime have been killed or attempted.

A second group that was sometimes used to liquidate opponents of Putin's regime was the so-called Wagner group. The group is a paramilitary organisation that has long acted as a private militia of Vladimir Putin, and was led by Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin (1961-2023), the man who had received 10 million dollars from Putin in 2014 to develop his infamous troll factory in Saint Peterburg.

Пригожин и Путин в 2011 году

The Wagner group fought in the Syrian civil war on the side of dictator Bashar al-Assad (°1965), and was also deployed in Ukraine in 2022, including to attempt to assassinate President Volodimir Oleksandrovich Zelensky (°1978) and to destroy the Azovstal factories. in Mariupol. Later, the group also fought on a lease basis for military juntas to carry out mass killings in Africa, including in Niger, Sudan, the Central African Republic and Mali. However, the relationship between the foul-mouthed Prigozhin and Putin began to become increasingly cloudy, and after the Wagner group invaded the city of Rostov-on-Don on June 23, 2023 to launch a raid on Moscow from there, Putin apparently decided that enough was enough. On August 23, 2023, an Embraer Legacy 600 private jet belonging to the Wagner Group crashed over the hamlet of Kuzhenkino in Tver Oblast. The aircraft had Prigozhin and Wagner group founder Dmitri Valerevich Utkin (1970-2023) on board. There were no survivors.

Anna Politkovskaya

Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya (1958-2006) was one of the few independant journalists in Russia and wrote for the Novaya Gazeta, the only newspaper daring to be critical, and she published some books of which Dirty War is well known. She was often threatened. A Russian army officer was impeached for it in 2003, but he was discharged. On October 7, 2006 she was found dead in an elevator of her apartment in Moscow, she appeared to be shot. The murderer had left the weapon, a revolver with bullits, in the elevator.

Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya

In February 2009, three suspects of the murder were brought to justice: Sergey Khadzhikurbanov, a former officer of the Moscow Police Directorate against Organized Crime, and two Chechen brothers Ibrahim Makhmudov and Dzhabrail Makhmudov. A third brother, Rustam Makhmudov, who would have fired the gun, could not be arrested because he was hiding in Belgium. The three accused were acquitted by a jury. After public protests, mainly from western countries, the Russian Supreme Court ordered a new trial. In the spring of 2011, a delegation of Russian investigators was sent to Belgium, where Rustam Makhmudov and his uncle Lom-Ali Gaitukaev were interrogated in the prisons of Dendermonde and Liège and handed over to the Russian authorities.

Pavel Ryaguzov, Sergey Khadzhikurbanov, Ibrahim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov

On December 14, 2012, Dmitry Pavlyuchenko, another former police officer, was sentenced to 11 years of penal colony for his involvement in the murder of Politkovskaya. At the time of the murder, Pavlyuchenko was lieutenant-colonel of the Fourth Division of the Moscow Police Search Unit. He told the investigators that the murder had been organised by Lom-Ali Gaitukaev, on demand of businessman Boris Abramovich Berezovsky (1946-2013). It would specifically have been asked to commit the murder on 7 October, the birthday of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (°1952). Gaitukaev would have been commissioned in July 2006, and would then have asked Pavlyuchenko, Khadzhikurbanov and his three cousins ​​to carry it out. But Aleksandr Bastrykin, head of the Investigation Commission, declared that there is no evidence for the involvement of Berezovsky.

Berezovsky, businessman and friend of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007), was convicted in Russia in absentia for embezzlement, fraud and money laundering, and lived in self-imposed exile in the United Kingdom since 2001. He got a refugee status in London and a passport in which he changed his name to Platon Elenin. He remained a staunch critic of Vladimir Putin, and was found dead in his apartment on March 23, 2013, with a noose around the neck.

On May 20, 2014 the three brothers Makhmudov, their uncle Lom-Ali Gaitukaev and Sergey Khadzhikurbanov were eventually found guilty by a jury in Moscow. On June 9, 2014, Lom-Ali Gaitukaev and Rustam Makhmudov were sentenced to life. Sergey Khadzhikurbanov was given 20 years, while the two other Makhmudov brothers were sentenced to 12 and 14 years as accomplices. The five exchanged smiles in their glass-fronted courtroom cage before they all received long sentences.

Vladimir Markin, the spokesman of the Investigative Committee said that the authorities are still looking for the real mastermind behind the murder. «Exhaustive measures are being taken at this time to find the killing’s initiator», he said.

Yuri Shchekochikhin

Yuri Petrovich Shchekochikhin (1950-2003) knew Anna Politkovskaya very well. He was her deputy editor-in-chief at the Novaya Gazeta. He was an investigative journalist, writer and also a liberal legislator in the Russian parliament for a while. Shchekochikhin wrote and campaigned against the influence of organised crime and corruption. His latest nonfiction book, Slaves of the KGB, was about people who worked as KGB informants.

As a journalist for the Novaya Gazeta, Yuri Shchekochikhin investigated the famous bombings of Russian apartments in September 1999 that sparked the Second Chechen War and were likely directed by the Russian secret services. Those bombings also played a role in Vladimir Putin's rise to power. Yuri Shchekochikhin also investigated the hree Whales Corruption Scandal, which involved senior FSB officers alleged to have played a role in money laundering through the Bank of New York.

Shchekochikhin died suddenly on July 3, 2003 of a mysterious illness a few days before his scheduled departure for the United States, where he planned to meet FBI investigators. His medical documents were either lost or destroyed by the authorities, according to the Novaya Gazeta.

The symptoms of his illness fit a pattern of radioactive poisoning and were similar to the symptoms of Alexander Litvinenko - more about this below - and some of Putin's other opponents. Litvinenko says the death of Yuri Shchekochikhin was a politically motivated murder.

Boris Nemtsov

Another opponent of the regime who’s life was violently ended was Boris Yefimovich Nemtsov (1959-2015).

Nemtsov entered politics during the failed coup against former Soviet leader Mikhail Sergeevich  Gorbachev (°1931) in August 1991. He organised the protest of citizens against insurgent soldiers in the defense of the parliament building. The coup failed and Nemtsov was noticed and included in the staff of former Russian President Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin (1931-2007). As a governor of his home city of Nizhny Novgorod, and from 1997 as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Energy, he played a major role in the privatisation of former communist state enterprises

In 1998, he had to resign and he founded the liberal party Union of Right Forces. He was a leader of the liberal opposition to President Vladimir Putin. In 2004, he supported the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and he was economic adviser to the former Ukrainian President Viktor Andriyovych  Yushchenko (°1953), whose face got severely disfigured as a result of a dioxin poisoning during the election campaign.

Boris Jefimovitsj Nemtsov

Boris Nemtsov was shot in central Moscow on Friday, February 27, 2015. He was 55 years old. An unidentified gunman shot him four times in the back when he was walking across the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Most, a bridge at less than 100 meters from the Kremlin. He died a few hours after he had made a call to protest against the war in Ukraine in a mass demonstration on the next Sunday.

A few days before the murder Nemtsov had said in an interview that he feared that the president wanted him dead for his opposition to the war. The place where the murder was committed, and where your webmaster passed daily when he was living in Moscow, is infested with CCTV cameras. Therefore, there must be images of what happened. It was also a striking finding that the Russian Minister of Interior Affairs, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kolokoltsev (°1961), arrived immediately after the events at the crime scene to «supervise the investigation personally».

In 2013, Mentsov published Winter Olympics in the Sub-Tropics, a report on the corruption and abuse involved in the organisation of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The former President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, (°1967) told CNN that Nemtsov was now working on a report about the Russian involvement in the conflict with Ukraine. «He prepared an announcement on Ukraine», Saakashvili said. «He wanted to tell the Russian public what is going on there.» This may have been fatal to Nemtsov. Journalist and Human Rights activist Aleksandr Ryklin, a friend of his said: «Anyone who stands up for Ukraine these days s seen as a traitor by the Russian media. An atmosphere is created in which everyone who disagrees with Putin is a traitor. This is certainly true when it comes to Ukraine.»

At that time, Russia officially denied that its soldiers were fighting in Ukraine. In reality, Russian soldiers were killed every day in this «undeclared war». Their bodies are returned to Russia in trucks as Груз 200 [Gruz 200] or Cargo 200, the code name used in Russia for dead bodies as they are transported from the battlefield. Nemtsov was shot down in Moscow shortly after he had announced that he would publish a detailed report about the Russian involvement in Ukraine under the title Путин. Война. [Putin. Voyna] or Putin. War. After Nemtsov's death, some of his colleagues completed his report and published it on the Internet.

Click on the link blow to download Boris Mentsov's report [ru].

According to British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, Russia has «solved» the problem of the Cargo 200 in its own way. The country now has mobile crematoriums that can follow invading forces and «evaporate» dead soldiers. The British Ministry of Defense released a video of the trucks that can incinerate bodies one at a time and suggested on February 23, 2022, that the Kremlin might deploy them in its war with Ukraine in to hide the number of casualties.

On June 29, 2017, the Chechen ex-serviceman Zaur Dadaev (°1982) was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the murder of Nemtsov. He was arrested along with four companions who got sentences between 11 and 19 years in prison. Nemtsov's family is convinced that the five are not the real perpetrators, but only pawns of the real mastermind behind the attack: the Chechen leader Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov (°1976). Kadyrov called Dadaev «one of the bravest fighters he has ever known».

Ramzan Kadyrov

Sergey and Julia Skripal

On March 4, 2018, the defected Russian secret agent Sergey Viktorovich Skripal and his daughter Julia were contaminated by novichok in the English city of Salisbury. Novichok is one of the deadliest nerve agents. It is much stronger than other poisons such as sarin and could be more difficult to control with atropine. It is a very deadly weapon that is certainly not available everywhere and that raises the suspicion very much to the Russian government.

Skripal was ill for a long time, but survived, but the British police officer Nick Bailey died after examining Skripal's home, and was in turn poisoned by the remains of the substance.

Sergey Skripal

Later that year, on July 8, the 44-year-old Dawn Sturgess died in Amesbury, Wiltshire, 11 kilometers north of Salisbury. Her friend Charley Rowley had retrieved a vial that looked like a bottle of Nina Ricci perfume from a charity trash can and had given it to her as a present. The police believe that the perpetrators of the attack on the Skripals threw the vial in that bin after their attack on the Skripals.

Julia Skripal

The attack is attributed by the British to Aleksander Petrov (°1979) and Ruslan Borshirov (°1979), two Russian «tourists» who had been in Salisbury. In a video made later on, the two men would neither confirm nor deny it. They were only saying that they wanted to «visit Salisbury Cathedral as tourists».

Bellingcat [1], a website of investigative journalists, would later identify them as Doctor Aleksander Yevgenevich Mishkin (°1979) and Colonel Anatoly Vladimirovich Chepiga (°1979), both members of the Russian military intelligence service ГРУ [GRU].

Assassination attempt on Aleksey Navalny

Aleksey Anatolievich Navalny, on whom you can read much more on the page Show Trials in Today's Russia, was once poisoned with novichok. On August 20, 2020, Navalny, en route from Tomsk to Moscow by plane, had to be taken again to the intensive care unit of a hospital in Omsk. The incident caused international commotion and raised questions from government leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron. After the hospital in Omsk initially noticed no symptoms of poisoning and refused to let him go to Germany for further treatment, he was transferred to Berlin on August 22. In Berlin, the doctors discovered that he had been poisoned with novichok.

Aleksey Anatolievich Navalny

Aleksey Navalny survived the attack. The prosecutor declined to investigate the incident because there were «no signs of a crime», and the Kremlin denied involvement in the case.

The investigative websites Bellingcat [1] and The Insider, in collaboration with the news channel CNN and the German weekly Der Spiegel, not only found signs of a crime, they also found the names of the perpetrators. With this information, Navalny set to work himself.

Navalny recorded a telephone conversation tat he had with Konstantin Borisovich Kudryavtsev (°1979), one of the FSB agents who had to retrieve Navalny's clothes after the poisoning to remove the traces of the novichok before they could be tested by independent experts. Navalny used caller ID spoofing software to impersonate the call from an FSB office.

Konstantin Kudryavtsev

During the phone call, he pretended to be an assistant to the secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolay Platonovich Patrushev (°1951) and said that he needed to investigate why the mission had failed.

Nikolay Platonovich Patrushev

Kudriavtsev unsuspectingly confessed that the novichok had been applied to Navalny's underwear while he was staying at the hotel in Tomsk, and that the poison had, apparently been absorbed too slowly by his body. He said the pilots diverted the flight to Omsk too soon and the doctors in Omsk administered an antidote «almost immediately».

The recording of the phone call was released on December 21, 2020. Click on the arrow below to listen to the full conversation with English text.

On January 17, 2021, Navalny returned to Russia. He was immediately arrested upon his arrival. The reason was alleged that he violated the terms of his suspended sentence in a previous case. He was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison.

Navalny was imprisoned in the Penal Colony IK-6 in Melekhovo, 150 kilometers east of Moscow. On December 5, 2023, he disappeared without a trace. On January 10, 2024, he reappeared on social media and said he had been transferred to the Penal Colony IK-3 in Kharp, near the Arctic Circle. On February 17, 2024, the prison reported that he had died that day at 14:17 local time.

Sergey Magnitsky

If you thought that the previous story was the most absurd example, then you are mistaking. On July 11, 2013, the District Court of Tver sentenced Sergey Leonidovich  Magnitsky (1972-2009) for embezzling 230 million USD. Macabre detail: Magnitsky was already dead since three and a half years. On November 16, 2009, he died in a cell of the Butyrka prison in Moscow. He was already eleven months in prison without trial, and should therefore have been released eight days later, according to the Russian law.

Sergey Leonidovich Magnitsky

Sergey Magnitsky was a lawyer who worked on behalf of Bill Browder (°1964), the American owner of Hermitage Capital Management, an investment fund in London, specialised in the Russian market. Magnitsky had discovered that, under the care of the Russian Interior Minister and some senior tax officials, a system was set up by which 230 million USD had been stolen from the company.

On June 4, 2007, 20 tax officials searched the Moscow office of Browder, and the documents they took were used to change the company ownership and turn it into a heavily loss-making business. The«new owner» turned out to be Viktor Aleksandrovich Markelov (°1967), a convicted murderer who had been released two years earlier. Shortly after this raid, the company had made so many losses that it was entitled to a tax refund of 230 million USD. On December 24, 2007, this amount was repaid... to the «new owner».

Bill Browder

Browder contacted the Russian government with the findings of Magnitsky, and demanded that the money would be returned, not to Hermitage, but to the Russian people, and that the guilty ones would be prosecuted. The Russian government started a prosecution, albeit not against the police officers and officials who were involved in the theft. Instead, Magnitsky was accused of embezzling 17 million USD, and Browder could no longer access the Russian Federation.

Sergey Magnitsky was transferred to the Butyrka prison, one of the most notorious detention centers in Russia. He was regularly denied medical care.

An official inquiry committee, which was commissioned by president Dmitry Medvedev, would show in July 2011 that the indictment of the prosecutor against Magnitsky was a fabrication. The committee also revealed that his death was due to the denial of medical care, and they even found evidence of torture.

Bill Browder then began to lobby in the United States, and with success. On December 14, 2012, President Barack Obama signed the Magnitsky Act This law forbade all those responsible for the death of Magnitsky access to the United States and the use of the U.S. banking system.

The Russian government responded in turn. On December 28, 2012, the Tver District Court ruled that the doctors involved at the Butyrka prison could not be imputed, and the dead Magnitsky was taken to court. He was found guilty. When Magnitsky's lawyers said that they would appeal, the Russian government responded with the laconic statement that «dead people can not appeal». It was not explained, however how dead people can be convicted.

Aleksandr Litvinenko

Aleksandr Valterovich Litvinenko (1962-2006) worked at the Central Staff of Counterintelligence when in 1994 he was part of the team investigating an assassination attempt on the oligarch Boris Berezovsky (1946-2013). He later became the oligarch's security officer. During his tenure at the FSB, Litvinenko discovered several connections between the highest echelons of the Russian security services and Russian mafia gangs such as the Solntsevo gang. He reported on this to then President Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007).

Aleksandr Litvinenko

On July 25, 1998, Aleksandr Litvinenko was introduced by Berezovsky to Vladimir Putin, who had become head of the FSB on the same day. He reported to Putin about corruption in the FSB, but Putin was not interested. After the first meeting, Litvinenko told his wife about this: «I could see from his eyes how much he hated me». Litvinenko had said he was conducting an investigation into the Uzbek drug lords protected by the FSB, an investigation that Putin has curbed.

After organizing a press conference with four other FSB officers in which they accused four high-ranking crime-fighting officials of plotting to kill Berezovsky, Litvinenko was fired. Later, in an interview with journalist Yelena Viktorovna Tregubova (°1973), Vladimir Putin would state that he himself had pushed for Litvinenko's resignation, because «FSB officers should not disclose internal scandals».

Litvinenko was arrested and released in 2000, after which he was granted asylum in the United Kingdom. He worked there as a journalist, writer and consultant for the British intelligence services. Meanwhile, he continued to write about covert FSB operations, including the September 1999 bombings of Russian apartments, which Yuri Shchekochikhin (1950-2003) had also investigated. In 2002, Litvinenko was sentenced in absentia to three and a half years in prison for alleged corruption. That did not stop him from further investigating the Russian security services and their links with terrorist organisations around the world.

In 2006 he provided a voluminous file on the Yukos case to Leonid Borisovich Nevzlin (°1959), an associate of Mikhail Khodorkovski and Platon Lebedev. Several disappearances and murders were reported in that file. He also identified Putin as the principal for the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and collected evidence that the death of Yuri Petrovich Shchekochichin (1950-2003), Politkovskaya's deputy editor-in-chief at the Novaya Gazeta, was politically motivated.

Leonid Borisovich Nevzlin

He may have signed his death warrant with the latter. On November 1, 2006, Litvinenko became ill and was to a hospital with symptoms of poisoning. Later investigations revealed that he administered a high dose of radioactive polonium-210 through a teapot in London's Millennium Hotel. He passed away on November 23, 2006.

At the end of January 2007, it became known that the English detectives had sufficient incriminating evidence against Andrey Konstantinovich Lugovoy (°1966) and Dmitri Vladimirovich Kovtun (°1965), two businessmen who used to work for the KGB and who met Litvinenko at the Millennium Hotel on the day that he got sick. But because they live in Russia, they cannot be prosecuted.

È pericoloso sporgersi

In 2022, after the start of the Russian war in Ukraine, 35 influential Russians were killed in questionable circumstances. Among them oligarchs, senior officials and politicians. Some curious details: they had all spoken out against the war in Ukraine, and a large number of them had«fallen out of a window».

The most prominent victims of these «accidents» were Ravil Maganov (1983-2022), chairman of the Russian oil giant Lukoil, Aleksander Subbotin (1955-2022), another former Lukoil executive, Pavel Antov (1957-2022), owner of the Vladimir Standard meat processing plant, Pavel Pshelnikov (1965-2022), chief executive of the Russian railways, Anatoly Gerashenko (1950-2022), former head of the Moscow Aviation Institute, and Vasily Melnikov (1979-2022), co-owner of the oil company Neftechimic Prekarpatya.

Ravil Maganov naast Poetin in 2019

Some doctors had already undergone the same fatal fate in 2020. They had criticized the failing policies of the Russian government during the COVID-19 pandemic on social media. One of them was Natalya Lebedeva (1972-2020), head of the ambulance service of Звездный городок [Zvezdny gorodok] or Star City, the Russian training center for cosmonauts, of which only insiders know where it is.

[1] Bellingcat is a Netherlands-based investigative journalism group that specialises in fact-checking and open-source intelligence. It was founded by British journalist and former blogger Eliot Higgins in July 2014. They revealed, for instance, how Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down while flying over eastern Ukraine On 17 July 2014. It was officially concluded that the missile that shot down MH17 was from the 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade from Kursk in the Russian Federation.

On Friday, July 15, 2022, Russia designated the Bellingcat investigative outlet as an undesirable organisation, outlawing its operations inside the country. Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office accused Bellingcat and its Russian partner The Insider of posing a threat to the security of the Russian Federation. Any Russian who cooperates with the outlets or cites their work now faces criminal prosecution.