Gee I am so surprised. Another Putin opponent is mysteriously shot or poisoned...

[stevenleser]

No doubt he will blame Nuland or Psaki or Kerry or Obama or the CIA or all the above.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/putins-russia-dont-walk-dont-eat-and-dont-drink

Putin’s Russia: Don’t Walk, Don’t Eat, and Don’t Drink
BY MASHA GESSEN

Last Saturday, on a beautiful, sunny afternoon, a friend and I were in Moscow discussing precautions. I confessed to a fear of apartment-building entryways because two people I knew, the parliament member Galina Starovoitova and the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, had been shot dead on their way up to their apartments. “Ever since Nemtsov was killed,” my friend said, referring to the February shooting of a Putin opponent, “I don’t know anything about precautions anymore. What are you supposed not to do now—walk the streets?”

It would also be prudent now to stop eating and drinking. On Wednesday, Vladimir Kara-Murza, a thirty-three-year-old opposition journalist, was hospitalized in critical condition after he collapsed at his office in Moscow. He was diagnosed with renal failure that had resulted from acute intoxication. Put more simply, the problem was poison.

It is not clear when and how Kara-Murza may have been poisoned, but Russian activists and journalists who get enough death threats and take them sufficiently seriously to hire bodyguards are also usually careful about what they ingest. Soon after the chess champion Garry Kasparov quit the sport to go into politics full time, in 2004, he hired a team of eight bodyguards, who not only accompanied him everywhere but also carried drinking water and food for Kasparov to eat at meals shared in public. Three years ago, Kasparov told me that what he liked most about foreign travel was being able to shed his bodyguards for a while. A year after that, threats drove him to leave Russia permanently.

Attacks by poisoning are possibly even more common in Russia than assassinations by gunfire. Most famously, Alexander Litvinenko, a secret-police whistle-blower, was killed by polonium in London, in 2006. Last week, British newspapers reported that a Russian businessman who dropped dead while jogging in a London suburb in 2012 had been killed by a rare plant poison. He had been a key witness in a money-laundering case that had originally been exposed by the Moscow accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who was tortured to death, in 2009, in a Russian jail.

[RKP5637]

1. Putin, KGB, not surprised! Putin has an agenda for Russia. I would how many in Russia

really get it, what's going on.

[DonCoquixote]

2. cue the Putinista fan club

They love Dear Leader.

[NuclearDem]

3. Obviously not Putin.

It was Chechens.

Or other opposition members. Need martyrs don't you know!

Or CIA trying to make Putin look bad.

Or a Ukrainian girlfriend.

Or secret boyfriend.

Notice how the only person without any interest in killing people in opposition to Putin is Putin himself.

[stevenleser]

4. Kick n/t

[awoke_in_2003]

5. Where was Snowden during all of this?

[stevenleser]

6. The type of hero Snowden fashions himself as apparently doesn't include the courage to

Speak truth to the power of the murderous dictator of the country in which he now resides.

Either that or he views metadata storage as a much more grievous crime than the murder of journalists and opposition leaders and complete lack of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the removal of the last illusions of any kind of Democracy in Russia.

Very selective outrage and heroism, that Snowden.