by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
American politicians (primarily MAGA Republicans) who relentlessly fawn over Russian leader Vladimir Putin might be well advised not to ever make their political idol angry. People who piss the Vladster off seem to be at risk of dying before their time.
There was a time when people out-of-favor with Putin and the Russian government appeared prone to fall victim to mysterious poisonings. Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian Federal Security Officer who had defected to Great Britain, was poisoned and killed in his host country in 2006. In 2018, Sergei Skripal, a former Russian Military Intelligence Officer and defector, was also poisoned in Great Britain, but he survived. But perhaps the best known Russian poisoning victim was Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption activist, who was poisoned while on an in-country flight in Russia in 2020. After his difficult recovery in Germany, Navalny returned to Russia and was promptly arrested for breaking the terms of his parole, and today he is incarcerated in a Russian prison. A couple of other prominent Putin critics, including a performer with the band "Pussy Riot," were also poisoned but recovered.
With the effectiveness rate of poisonings clearly leaving something to be desired, a new approach to the elimination of political troublemakers in Russia came to the fore. Critics of the government, and particularly individuals who seemed to aggravate Putin, started falling out of high-rise windows. In April and May of 2020 two Russian doctors who had complained about working conditions at their hospital during the pandemic were killed after falling out of the windows of their hospital - and a third was seriously injured. In December of 2020 Alexander Kagansky, a Russian scientist working on a COVID vaccine, was found dead of a stab wound in St. Petersburg, Russia, after falling from a window in a high rise building. (A stab would AND a long fall. Someone really wanted to make sure on that one!)
Krill Zhalo, a Russian diplomat died in Berlin on October 19, 2021, after a fall from his embassy window. Ravil Maganov, the chariman of Russia's second largest oil company - a company which had officially criticized Russia's war against Ukraine - died after falling out of a high rise window while on a visit to India on Christmas Day of 2022. And in February of 2023, Marina Yankina, a Russian defense official, died from a fall out of a high-rise window in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Obviously, falls out of the windows of tall buildings were far more effective than poisonings in handling political malcontents, though still not 100% effective.
If there was ever a Russian who was almost certain to meet an early death through some nefarious means, that man would have been Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenary group which had been performing most of the actual combat in Ukraine. Prigozhin, who harbored some animosity toward Putin and was unhappy with the way the Russian military officials were using his men, suddenly turned a large contingent of his troops toward Moscow this past June, and for several hours they appeared to be garnering strong public support as they headed toward the capital of Russia. Many Russians cheered the uprising while many others were in a panic. Prigozhin called the march off after six hours, but it had received a wealth of international press coverage, and Putin came out of the prolonged affair looking weak and indecisive. The Russian leader needed time to assess his own power, and he held his wrath toward Prigozhin in reserve.
But Putin would have his day, and everybody knew it.
Yesterday a private jet dropped from the sky north of Moscow. The passenger manifest listed one of ten people on board as Yevgeny Prigozhin. Onlookers said the plane appeared to be missing a wing as it slammed into the ground and burst into flames.
Russian justice, it would seem, does not always come with an appeal process.
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