The bigger Russian outrage
We’ll learn soon enough about the depth and extent of the economic and political ties that link Donald Trump’s campaign and administration to the murderous gangster government of Vladimir Putin. But even as the investigations proceed, the American public should demand a full accounting of what Trump officials personally know about — and are prepared to do about — the widespread theft, bloodshed and human rights abuses emanating from the Kremlin.
This weekend, thousands took to the streets in more than 100 Russian cities — an estimated 8,000 in Moscow alone, according to the state-run news service Tass — demanding an end to years of organized looting by the Putin regime. Vast tracts of the economy have been turned over to favored cronies, many of whom are now billionaires.
The response to the demonstrations by Putin’s security services was swift, predictable and brutal. Hundreds were arrested, including Alexey Navalny, a political activist who’s been jailed by Putin before, including in 2013 on the day after he registered to run for mayor of Moscow.
“There are things in life that are worth being detained for,” Navalny tweeted after his latest arrest. He has announced plans to run for president in 2018, an act of sublime courage in a land where opponents of Putin regularly turn up dead.
A few days before the protests, a man named Denis Voronenkov, a former member of the Russian Parliament who had fled the country and become a Putin critic, was gunned down in broad daylight in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. The president of Ukraine immediately branded the Mafia-style hit an “act of state terrorism by Russia.”
Voronenkov met a fate similar to that of Boris Nemstov, a former deputy prime minister who led street rallies in 2011 against rampant voter fraud and published damning information about the extent of official corruption by Putin and his allies. In February 2015, Nemstov was murdered right outside the Kremlin, shot four times in the back in a crime that has never been solved.
Other critics of the regime who met a violent end include the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who documented Putin’s reckless use of indiscriminate bombing and torture in the war against Chechen separatists and compiled many of her findings in a book called “Putin’s Russia.”
Politkovskaya was shot to death in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building on Oct. 7, 2006, Putin’s birthday. Five men were eventually sentenced to life in prison for her murder, which a judge ruled was a contract killing for $150,000 from a source that has never been determined.
And the list goes on. In 2003, Sergei Yushenkov, a former Army colonel, was shot to death outside his Moscow apartment shortly after starting a new political party called Liberal Russia.
That same year, a journalist named Yuri Shchekochikhin, who wrote about crime and official corruption, died of a mysterious ailment shortly before he was scheduled to leave for the United States; the Russian authorities declared the circumstances of his death a classified matter, and that was that.
In 2009, journalist Natalya Estemirova, who had covered abuses in the anti-Chechen campaign, was kidnapped and shot point-blank in the head; her murder has never been solved.
That same year, a lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky died in police custody after being brutally beaten; he’d been investigating tax fraud by local authorities.
Stanislav Markelov, a human rights lawyer who represented journalists and clients claiming abuse by the military, was shot dead by a masked gunman near the Kremlin in 2009, along with a journalist who ran to his aid. The government blamed the attack on neo-Nazis.
That is a very partial list of Putin victims. Many more cases are detailed in “Winter Is Coming,” a book by Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion turned human rights activist.
What matters now is not simply which branch of Putin’s government tried to swing the 2016 American elections to Donald Trump. A much bigger question is: Why were so many American businesses, consultants and political operatives willing to do business in the first place with a tyrant whose goals, methods and aims appear to be copied straight from “The Godfather”?
A related question: What are the financial ties between the Putin kleptocracy and Trump administration officials? That includes the Trump Organization, whose undisclosed financial ties remain reach directly into the White House.
The hacking of the election may be the least of the questions we need answered.