All Too Convenient

Forgive me if I continue to be suspicious, based on this editorial in yesterday’s New York Times, regarding the explanation from Yuri Chaika, Russia’s prosecutor general, about some notable murders in that country over the last year or so.

According to the Times, Chaika announced the arrests of 10 people involved in the murder of the crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and perhaps also the killing of an American journalist, Paul Klebnikov, and the deputy head of the Russian Central Bank, Andrei Kozlov (a prior post on this appears here).

But now, it appears that a military court has overturned a decision by a lower court to sanction the arrest of Federal Security Service officer Pavel Ryaguzov, who served in the FSB's Moscow branch and focused on ethnic crime groups (Ryaguzov has been linked to a criminal group that carried out contract hits of the type that killed Politkovskaya and the others mentioned by the Times editorial, with 9 other members of the group).

Who knows how the word could have gone forward to kill these people. And why do I have a feeling that individuals will escape accountability due to legal technicalities?

As noted in the prior post, Politkovskaya wrote about what she saw (correctly, I think) as abuses under Putin, specifically regarding human rights in Chechnya. For speaking out, she was executed in as cold blooded a fashion as you can imagine.

And the explanation from Chaika that a Putin critic was behind all of this, as opposed to Putin himself “signing off” to one degree or another, makes no sense to me, particularly after reading this.