Putin’s long, sinister reach

Critics are right to question the elaborate “fake news” sting used by Ukraine’s security service to foil a Kremlin plot to kill leading Russian dissident journalist and Putin critic Arkady Babchenko in Kiev. The fake reports of his death were, in fact, part of an elaborate plot to catch those trying to kill him. The bigger issue it raised was the dangers Russian dissidents face from Vladimir Putin’s mafia state and its intimidation of opponents.

Babchenko has been a courageous and unrelenting critic of Mr Putin, especially over the Russian invasion of Ukraine, its illegal annexation of Crimea, and Soviet-style aggression in Syria. After innumerable threats to his life, Babchenko sought asylum in Ukraine last year. But Kiev has been described as “a killing field for the Kremlin” and he soon was threatened with assassination. Ukrainian security authorities’ ruse to fake Babchenko’s death included publication of gruesome photographs of his body as a way, they said, of drawing out the real would-be killers operating on Moscow’s orders.

Other journalists and Putin critics in Kiev also have been targeted, including one in a car-bomb attack. A dissident Russian MP has been assassinated in the Ukrainian capital. Few places are out of Mr Putin’s reach, as shown by the nerve agent attack in England on former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. This week, prominent US-British investor Bill Browder, a Putin critic and driving force behind the Magnitsky laws adopted by the US, Britain, Canada and the Baltic States to impose sanctions on Russian human rights abusers, was detained in Madrid on a bogus Interpol warrant.

Moscow denies any knowledge of a conspiracy to kill Babchenko or anyone else. But this is the same Moscow that has been barefaced in rejecting any involvement in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 in 2015, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. A litany of domestic assassinations of Putin adversaries attests to the sinister, pervasive actions of the Russian President’s “Murder Inc” operatives. Other nations must do more to sanction the Kremlin over its killing sprees.