Strange how so many internal critics of Putin and his cronies pay the ultimate price

Not your ordinary president. Randy Newman’s Putin song, 2017:

You mean he’s just like a regular fella, huh?

He ain’t nothing like a regular fella.

Former senator Stephen Loosley, The Australian, February 28:

And tell any Western mission in Moscow just how comfortable life is and they may let you know what Russian goons do in their homes with faecal deposits to remind them of just where they are in Putin’s Russia.

But much of what happens to Putin’s enemies is whiffy. BBC, March 1:

Thousands of people have taken to the streets of Russia’s capital to mark five years since the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. Mr Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and prominent Kremlin critic, was shot dead in 2015. On the night before his death, he took part in a radio interview in which he backed a protest march.

Of course it’s a coincidence. London Telegraph, March 28, 2014:

Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch and critic of Vladimir Putin, may have been murdered, a coroner ruled. Mr Berezovsky’s daughter, ­Elizaveta, had told how she feared that he had been assassinated by Kremlin “enemies” for warning that the Russian President was a “danger to the world”.

Russia is a country of coincidences. Washington Post, April 29, 2019:

For several years, the Russian government has tried to wiggle out from under responsibility for the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a 37-year-old tax law expert who died in a Moscow prison on November 16, 2009. Magnitsky had exposed Russian officials who fraudulently obtained a $230m tax ­refund from their government using pilfered corporate documents.

You wouldn’t read about it. Radio Free Europe, October 7, 2019:

… Prominent Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya … a critic of President Vladimir Putin … was shot dead in her Moscow apartment building on October 7, 2006.

Not again. Business Insider, March 12, 2016:

Alexander Litvinenko was a former KGB agent who died three weeks after drinking a cup of tea at a London hotel that had been laced with deadly polonium-210. A British inquiry found that Litvinenko was poisoned by FSB agents … who were acting on orders that had “probably been approved by Mr Patrushev and also by President Putin”.

It doesn’t pay to oppose Putin. Or his mates. The Guardian, January 20, 2011:

One of Russia’s top human rights lawyers was assassinated in the centre of Moscow yesterday in a killing apparently linked to his work defending opponents of the pro-Kremlin government in Chechnya. Stanislav Markelov, 34, was shot in the head by a man using a pistol with a silencer in the middle of the afternoon on a busy Moscow street.

Putin always has an alibi. He was in the Kremlin. Irish Times, April 18, 2003:

A liberal Russian politician and critic of President Vladimir Putin was shot dead outside his Moscow flat last night … Mr Sergei Yushenkov was shot three times in the back at about 5.30pm.

He’s just a regular fella. The Sydney Morning Herald, January 6, 2017:

What is it about Russia that winds everyone up so much … It’s time we asked why we in the West can’t work with the Kremlin …