Arrests in the Politkovskaya Case
Filed under: Russia
Nearly a year after her killing, the Kremlin has claimed to have identified some of the assassins who participated in the cowardly murder of Russian hero journalist Anna Politkovskaya. The case is already starting to fall apart as prosecutors have brought actual charges against only a tiny fraction of the group they arrested, and the upshot is that the Kremlin is trying to blame the murder once again on dissident exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky -- just as it did with Alexander Litvinenko. In fact, it's even tried to bring other dissident murders into the mix as well, such as that of crusading regulator Andrei Kozlov and Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov. So basically what we are seeing is Kremlin foes dropping like ducks at a shooting gallery, and it turns out that, according to the Kremlin, they were all killed . . . by another Kremlin foe, the one the Kremlin can't reach by any other means than convincing the world he's a mass murderer and getting him deported from England on that basis, where he's now being protected as a refugee. Isn't that just a little bit too convenient? Is it even remotely sane to suggest that Berezovsky could be so powerful as to control an army of KGB assassins, get his hands on Russian nuclear material, elude Russian security forces and yet think of no better way of undermining the Kremlin than to kill off his own allies at the risk of being deported back to Russia from his safe haven in Britain? Is it really possible that the Kremlin can be so isolated and disconnected from reality that it might think it could get the world -- or even the people of Russia -- to swallow such a story? Apparently so. And perhaps, next to an event like Putin joking about rape in front of a diplomatic delegation or Khrushchev taking off his shoe at the UN, it's not even all that extreme by Russian standards.
Read a full briefing on the details at La Russophobe (including an outing of several treacherous bloggers who are making common cause with the Kremlin by spewing outrageous propaganda). Click here to read our extended coverage of Vladimir Putin's long history of political murder since he arrived in Moscow (we discuss Politkovskaya, Kozlov, Klebnikov, Litvinenko and many others).
One bit of good news is that Anna's newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, is now available online in English (the photo above is from their site). The quality of their translations is still a bit clunky (those with an interest in Russia and good English skills are encouraged to contact the paper and volunteer their editing services), but their coverage of Russia is required reading.
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