2023-08-26 09:17:47
Tallinn During the almost 25 years that Russian head of state Vladimir Putin has been in power, there have been repeated assassinations of his opponents. Contaminated tea or a neurotoxin were used in the attacks, among other things.
Until now, nothing was known about a Kremlin critic, spy or investigative journalist being killed by plane. But on Wednesday, a private plane fell after it broke – the head of the mercenary troupe Wagner Yevgeny Prigozhin is said to have been on board.
In August 2020, opposition leader Alexei Navalny fell ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow. The plane lands in the city of Omsk, where Navalny, in a coma, is being treated in hospital. Two days later he is flown to Berlin, where he is recovering.
From his environment it is said almost immediately that he was poisoned. Russian authorities deny this. Laboratories in Germany, France and Sweden confirm poisoning with a Soviet-era nerve agent, Novichok.
After his return to Russia, Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in prison on charges of extremism, among other things. Navalny describes the allegations against him as politically motivated.
In 2018, a founder of the Pussy Riot protest group, Pyotr Versilov, fell seriously ill. He too will be flown to Berlin. Doctors there suspect poisoning. Versilov is recovering.
Before falling ill, he had embarrassed the Kremlin by running onto the field with three other activists during the World Cup final in Moscow. He was protesting against police brutality. His allies believe he may have been targeted for his actions as an activist.
Prominent opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Mursa says he survived an attempted poisoning in 2015 and 2017. At first he almost dies of kidney failure.
A cause for this is not determined. In 2017 he was hospitalized with a similar illness, where he was placed in an artificial coma. His wife reports that the doctors have confirmed poisoning.
Kara-Musa was sentenced earlier this year to 25 years in prison for high treason.
Boris Nemzow
Opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was shot dead from a car near the Kremlin walls in February 2015.
(Photo: dpa)
The most sensational fatal assassination attempt on a political opponent in Russia in recent years was the case of Boris Nemtsov. The former deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin was an outspoken critic of Putin.
He was shot dead by attackers on a bridge near the Kremlin in February 2015 while he was out with his girlfriend. Five men from the Russian region of Chechnya were convicted in the case, and the alleged shooter received up to 20 years in prison. However, Nemtsov’s environment speaks of an attempt to divert responsibility from the government.
secret service agent
In 2006, former KGB and FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko fell seriously ill in London after drinking radioactive tea. He dies three weeks later. He was investigating the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya and suspected Russian intelligence links to organized crime.
According to a British investigation, Russian agents killed Litvinenko, probably with Putin’s consent. The Kremlin denies any involvement.
Former intelligence officer Sergei Skripal survives poisoning in Britain in 2018. The condition of him and his adult daughter Julia has been critical for several weeks. The attack on her costs a British woman her life.
This is how the Handelsblatt reports on the Ukraine war:
According to the authorities, the Skripals used Novichok. Britain blames the Russian secret service for the poisoning, while Moscow denies involvement. Putin has called Skripal, who spied as a double agent for Britain, a “scumbag” of no importance to the Kremlin because he was on trial in Russia and was part of an agent swap in 2010.
journalists
Anna Politkovskaya of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow on Putin’s birthday in October 2006. Politkovskaya had received international attention for her reporting on human rights violations in Chechnya. A man from Chechnya has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for the murder.
In 2003, the reporter Yuri Shchekochikhin from “Novaya Gazeta” died of a sudden and severe illness. He had investigated corrupt dealings and possible involvement of the Russian security service in the 1999 bombings for which insurgents from Chechnya were blamed. His colleagues say he was poisoned. They accuse the authorities of deliberately obstructing the investigation.
Yevgeny Prigozhin and senior officers
Prigozhin and senior officers of his private Wagner mercenary force are said to have died in Wednesday’s plane crash — exactly two months after his armed uprising, which Putin has described as a treason.
Yevgeny Prigoschin
The Wagner boss is said to have died on Wednesday. Presumably by an assassination.
(Photo: dpa)
Although Prigozhin was not a critic of Putin, he had sharply criticized the Russian military leadership and questioned the motives for the Russian war in Ukraine.
A preliminary assessment by the US secret service comes to the conclusion that the crash was deliberately caused by an explosion, according to Western sources. All ten occupants are said to have been killed. One source said the blast fits in with Putin’s long-standing efforts to “silence his critics.”
In his first public statements about the plane crash, Putin seemed to imply that he and Prigozhin were not on bad terms. But former Kremlin speechwriter Abbas Galliamov said: “Putin has shown that if you do not obey him unquestioningly, even if you are officially a patriot, he will deal with you without mercy, like an enemy.”
More: Prigozhin’s death and Putin’s weakness – How the Kremlin chief’s power is eroding
#Kremlin #opponents #attacked #killed #years