{"id":301,"date":"2024-02-17T15:32:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-17T12:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/?p=301"},"modified":"2024-07-16T15:34:28","modified_gmt":"2024-07-16T12:34:28","slug":"putins-assassin-toolkit-claims-navalny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/new-nobility\/putins-assassin-toolkit-claims-navalny\/","title":{"rendered":"Putin\u2019s Assassin Toolkit Claims Navalny"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every time a Putin opponent is killed \u2014 a journalist, a politician, or an activist \u2014 the Kremlin presents the same line of defense: the victim was so insignificant that Putin would hardly have bothered to bloody his hands organizing their termination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes the Kremlin\u2019s spin doctors might elaborate on that \u2014 who knows? \u2014 there might be some uncontrolled group, in the army, in wider Russian society, who could have taken it upon themselves to rid the nation of a troublemaker. But Putin and the Kremlin had nothing to do with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than 20 years of Putin\u2019s rule now provides a pretty good case study to demonstrate that political assassination makes perfect sense and that Putin, being a very practical man, embraced the strategy years ago. A whole panoply of assassination methods are part of his political toolkit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this dark marketing strategy, where Putin is the main product, the leader is sold to Russia as the nation\u2019s only possible leader and as a man who must have the power of life and death. No one really doubts this \u2014 and the Kremlin does little to dispute it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The use of assassination, the reaction of the Kremlin, and the narrative promoted in pro-Kremlin media \u2014 all help to calibrate the effects on a target audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is always a very practical reason to attack a victim with poison or bullets \u2014 or to torture them to death in a prison camp beyond the Arctic Circle.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In September 2004, when hundreds of reporters, including the authors of this piece, arrived at Beslan, where terrorists had taken hostage more than 1,000 people in a school, most of them children, Putin\u2019s people were busy organizing journalist Anna Politkovskaya\u2019s poisoning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Politkovskaya had been on her way to Beslan hoping to negotiate a hostage release. She didn\u2019t make it to Beslan since FSB agents poisoned her on a plane. She was rushed to hospital. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By essentially removing her from the Beslan drama, the FSB ensured negotiations failed, and more than 300 hostages were killed. It was a horrible tragedy, but the Russian authorities got what they wanted; which was not to talk to terrorists or reach any sort of deal. Putin would have regarded that as a humiliation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two years later Politkovskaya was shot dead by an assassin in Moscow in broad daylight. The killer\u2019s name hardly mattered; everyone knew who had masterminded the murder. Its purpose? To tell journalists that they should abandon coverage of Chechnya and what the authorities were doing there. It was a very practical matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same year Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer, who had exposed the FSB\u2019s crimes and defected to the UK, was also poisoned, this time with a radioactive substance. Not many doubted that Putin personally planned this assassination too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The horrifying photos<\/a> of the dying Litvinenko on his London hospital deathbed intimidated and terrified many Russians critical of the Kremlin. They understood that Putin could find and eliminate his enemies not only in Russia but also abroad. Again, it was a strong message \u2014 Putin\u2019s security services had a long arm, just like Stalin\u2019s assassins. So please, no more whistleblowers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2015, Boris Nemtsov joined the parade of the dead. He was a household name in Russia: he had been the youngest governor and a deputy prime minister when Putin was still a nondescript official.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nemtsov became an opposition leader, the only one back then who had the political weight to challenge Putin because in the late 1990s Yeltsin had blessed him as his successor. Nemtsov was killed<\/a> not with poison but with a bullet, a stone\u2019s throw from the Kremlin. Once again, Kremlin messaging was unambiguous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The slow murder of Alexey Navalny, forever moved between brutal Russian penal colonies, ever northward to ever-more ghastly conditions, eventually beyond the Arctic Circle, was also a well-calibrated strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The memory of Stalin\u2019s Gulag archipelago is burnt into the Russian DNA. Navalny\u2019s horrible final journey into the remotest parts of Russia\u2019s vastness was a certain means to evoke those memories. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Published in CEPA<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Agentura.ru 2024<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Navalny\u2019s sudden death carries all the hallmarks of the Putin regime. The Kremlin won\u2019t take responsibility because it doesn\u2019t need to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-nobility"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":303,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions\/303"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}