Mysterious surge in the deaths of Russian politicians puts Putin under suspicion

Photo by: kremlin.ru

A former member of the Russian parliament was shot dead in broad daylight in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. The long-time Russian ambassador to the UN dies on the job. The commander of the self-proclaimed Donetsk Republic was blown up in the elevator. A Russian media director was found dead in his hotel room in Washington, DC.

What do they have in common? They are among 38 prominent Russians who have been victims of unsolved murders or a suspicious death since the beginning of 2014, according to a list compiled by USA Today and British journalist Sarah Hearst, who conducted research in Russia.

In this list of 10, high-profile critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin, 7 diplomats, 6 associates of the Kremlin security officials who fell due to constant corruption, and 13 military or political leaders involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, including commanders. Perhaps two of them are related to a dossier that reports on links between President Trump’s headquarters and Kremlin officials.

Twelve people were shot, stabbed or beaten to death. Six people blew up. Ten died supposedly for natural reasons. One died of mysterious head injuries, one reportedly slipped and hit his head in a public bath, one hanged himself in his prison cell, and one died after drinking coffee. The causes of the six deaths are not known.

Apparently, Putin has been dealing with opponents for a long time. Senator Patrick Leahy said in March that Putin "killed his political opponents and rules like an authoritarian dictator."

Yet the list of deaths - 36 men and 2 women - suggests that Putin's alleged attacks on his critics and whistleblowers are more widespread and deadly than previously known. It also raises new concerns about contacts with Putin and his aides within the Trump campaign.

Trump praised Putin in March for 2016, as a “strong leader,” and in 2015, he said, “I would have gotten along well with” the Russian leader. February 6 Trump defended Putin when Bill O'Reilly and then Fox News, called Putin a murderer. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump responded. “Do you think our country is so innocent?”

The FBI and Congress are currently investigating contacts between Kremlin officials and advisers to the Trump campaign as part of an investigation into Russia's alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election of the year.

Leahy made his comment about Putin at a congressional hearing, which featured Russian political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza.

“We've seen political opposition leaders and activists, anti-corruption campaign whistleblowers and independent journalists get killed in one way or another,” Kara-Murza told USA Today. “Sometimes these are suspicious suicides and plane crashes, truly rare and terrible diseases, in many others they are outright murders.”

Kara-Murza worked with former Deputy Prime Minister and Putin’s opponent Boris Nemtsov before Nemtsov was shot dead in Moscow in 2015. Until recently, Kara-Murza worked with Russian anti-corruption lawyer and political candidate Alexei Navalny, who was doused with a chemical after his release from prison, where he was serving a sentence for holding unauthorized protests against the Putin government throughout Russia this spring.

Photo: Youtube

“Sometimes there are misses,” Kara-Murza told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee in March.

Kara-Murza said they wanted to poison him twice: in May, 2015, and in February of this year.

“Twice in the last 2 years I have had symptoms associated with poisoning, both times in Moscow,” he said in an interview. Both times the symptoms came suddenly and out of nowhere. Both times he was in a coma for weeks on life support. Both times the doctors gave him a 5% chance of survival, so he was very lucky.

Sen. Marco Rubio noted at the hearing: “In our system, if we make a bad decision, we can lose an election and work on television as a paid analyst,” he told Kara-Murza. “In your case, people die.”

Rubio and other senators called on Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to meet with members of Russia's political opposition during his April visit to Moscow, but Tillerson did not have time to meet, said spokesman Mark Toner.

Most of the old diplomats on the list were probably victims of poor health, said Boris Zilberman, an analyst from Russia at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy.

“Knowing how diplomats live, going from one cocktail party to the next, not from gym to gym, death finally catches up with them,” Silberman said.

This may apply to 64-year-old Vitaly Churkin, the Russian ambassador to the US, who died on February 12 in New York from a heart attack. Other cases, such as with 20-year-old Peter Polshikov, chief adviser of the Latin American department at the Russian Foreign Ministry, found dead with a gunshot wound in his Moscow home, December 56, require further investigation, Zilberman said.

Many of the recent deaths are suspicious, because several critics of Putin died in obvious killings a few years ago. These include:

• Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead during an afternoon walk with his girlfriend in the security zone near the Kremlin. Two Chechen suspects, one of whom is a former bodyguard of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, are under investigation, but the investigation has not revealed that anyone gave the order.
• Sergey Magnitskyand a Russian tax attorney who died in prison while investigating an alleged embezzlement of $ 230 million by Russian government officials. No one was charged.
• Alexander Litvinenko, A Russian spy who escaped from Russia and became a British citizen, but was killed in London in 2006 by radioactive polonium-210, helping the European authorities in investigating corruption. The state-sponsored murder was an attempt by the Russian government to send a chilling message to its critics, said in an interview with the British Daily Mail On April 17, former deputy commissioner of Scotland Yard, Peter Clark, who led the investigation. The British authorities established the 2 of the Russian accused, but Russia refused to extradite them, and no one was charged.

• Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist who denounced Russian atrocities during the war in the troubled Russian republic of Chechnya. She was shot in her Moscow apartment in 2006.

Two of the recent victims, Oleg Erovinkin and Alexey Oronov, have been described by Russian analysts as possibly being linked to a dossier written by a former British spy about Trump and his campaign's alleged collusion with Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

61-year-old Erovinkin, a general at a Russian spy agency and a close friend of Putin's confidant, was found dead in the back seat of his December 26 car in Moscow. The cause of death is unknown.

69-year-old Oronov, a Ukrainian businessman from New York, died under unknown circumstances on 2 March, according to Andriy Artemenko, a member of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. Oronov arranged a meeting between Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen and the Ukrainian deputy Artemenko in January. The purpose of the meeting was the peace plan for Ukraine, which will benefit Russia. Artemenko argued that Oronov died because of the plan.

Recent deaths include 46-year-old Matthew Puncher, a British polonium expert in the Litvinenko investigation. It is reported that he slaughtered himself in his home in Oxfordshire after returning from a trip to Russia in May last year.

Journalist Hirst, who helped compile the list of deaths, said the recent surge appeared to indicate growing political pressure on Putin and his cronies. “Putin is at the top of a criminal organization,” she said. “It’s no wonder he’s willing to kill people.”

Kara-Murza, who is still recovering from the alleged poisoning, said he has “no doubt that this was an attempt to kill me because of my political activities in the Russian opposition over the past few years, and more specifically because of my active participation in the campaign to support the Magnitsky Act, which calls for American sanctions against Russian officials involved in human rights abuses and corruption.

He plans to promote similar laws in other Western countries and return to Russia to continue his activity when he is physically stronger.

Since many of the suspicious deaths are related to corruption in the government or those who exposed it, Kara-Murza urged Congress to block Russians who stole the wealth of their country to invest in the United States.

“This is not just about money,” he said in a speech to the Senate. “What’s much more important is what message the United States is sending to Russia.”

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