Russian critics silenced forever
think our country is so innocent?”
The FBI and Congress are investigating contacts between Kremlin officials and Trump’s campaign advisers, as part of its investigation into Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Leahy made his comment about Putin at a congressional hearing that featured Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian political activist with personal experience of his government’s efforts to silence outspoken critics.
“We’ve seen political opposition leaders and activists, whistleblowers, anti-corruption campaigners and independent journalists lose their lives in one way or another,” Kara-Murza told USA TODAY. “Sometimes these are suspicious suicides and plane crashes, really rare and horrible diseases. In many others, they are straight murders.”
Kara-Murza worked with former deputy prime minister and Putin opponent Boris Nemtsov before Nemtsov was gunned down in Moscow in 2015. KaraMurza worked until recently with Russian anti-corruption lawyer and political candidate Alexei Navalny, who suffered eye injury Thursday after being attacked with a chemical following his release from jail for leading unsanctioned protests against the Putin government across Russia this spring. “Sometimes there are near-misses,” Kara-Murza testified in March before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee.
Kara-Murza said he was the victim of attempted poisonings twice: in May 2015 and this past February. “Twice in the past two years, I have experienced symptoms consistent with poisoning, both times in Moscow,” he said in an interview. “Both times, symptoms came on suddenly and out of nowhere. Both times spending weeks in a coma on life support machines. Both times, doctors set my chance of survival at 5%, so I’m very fortunate to be here today.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., noted at the hearing the dangers of winding up on the wrong side of politics in Russia. “In our system, if we make a bad decision, we might lose an election and have to work as a paid analyst on TV,” he told Kara-Murza. “In your case, people die.”
Rubio and other senators called on Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to meet with members of Russia’s political opposition during his visit to Moscow in April, but Tillerson did not have time for a meeting, deputy spokesman Mark Toner said.
Most of the older diplomats on the list were probably victims of poor health, said Boris Silberman, a Russia analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
“Knowing how diplomats live, going from one cocktail party to the next and not to the gym in between, it finally catches up to you,” Silberman said.
That could apply to Vitaly Churkin, 64, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, who died Feb. 20 in New York of an apparent heart attack. Others, such as Petr Polshikov, 56, a chief adviser to the Latin America Department at the Russian Foreign Ministry, found dead with a gunshot wound in his Moscow home Dec. 20, require further investigation, Silberman said.
“There’s almost a fever on the Russia story,” Silberman said. “Some of it is substantial. It’s almost like there’s something nefarious behind every piece of news. Sometimes there is. ... They tend to clean up their messes this way.”
Many of the recent deaths raise suspicions because a string of Putin critics died in murders years earlier. They include:
uNemtsov, who was shot to death while walking after dinner with his girlfriend in a security zone near the Kremlin. Two Chechen suspects, one a former bodyguard to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, are on trial, but the investigation did not reveal whether anyone ordered the hit.
uSergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax lawyer who died in prison while investigating the alleged theft of $230 million by Russian government officials. No one was charged.
uAlexander Litvinenko, a Russian spy who defected, became a British citizen and was murdered in London in 2006 with radioactive polonium-210 while helping European authorities in a corruption investigation. The “state-sponsored murder” was an effort by the Russian government to send a chilling message to its critics, Peter Clarke, Scotland Yard’s former deputy commissioner who led the investigation, told the British Daily
Mail on April 17. Two Russian suspects were identified by British authorities, but Russia refused to extradite them, and no one was charged.
uAnna Politkovskaya, an in- vestigative journalist who exposed Russian atrocities during the war in the restive Russian republic of Chechnya. She was gunned down in her Moscow apartment stairway in 2006. Former police officer Dmitry Pavliutchenkov was convicted of ordering surveillance of the journalist but denied killing her. He was sentenced in 2012 to 11 years in prison. Five alleged accomplices were convicted, including two who were sentenced to life in prison. Pavliutchenkov’s promise to identify who ordered the hit never resulted in further charges.
The list of recent Russian deaths does not include Matthew Puncher, 46, a British polonium expert in the Litvinenko inquiry, reported to have stabbed himself to death in his home in Oxfordshire after returning from a trip
to Russia last May.
Luke Harding chronicled a succession of suspected political
murders in his 2016 book, A Very Expensive Poison: The Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and
Putin’s War With the West. Former KGB officers and defectors described Soviet-era research into poisons used to kill enemies that continued in post- Soviet Russia, Harding wrote. Some substances are so rare and leave so little trace that death can be easily mistaken for a heart attack.
Journalist Hurst, who helped compile the list of deaths, said the recent uptick appears to be a sign of the growing political pressure on Putin and his cronies. “Putin is at the top of a criminal organization, (and) there are all these people who have dirt on him,” she said. “It’s not surprising he’s willing to bump people off.”
Kara-Murza, who is still recovering from the alleged poisoning and lives in the USA, said he has “absolutely no doubt this was an attempt to kill me because of my political activities in the Russian opposition for the last several years, and more specifically because of my active involvement in the campaign in support of the Magnitsky Act,” which calls for U.S. sanctions on Russian officials involved in human rights abuses and corruption.
He plans to push for similar laws in other Western countries, and to return to Russia to continue his activism when he is physically stronger.
Since many of the suspicious deaths are related to government corruption or those who exposed it, Kara-Murza urged Congress to block Russians who stole their nation’s wealth from investing in the USA.
“This is not only about money,” he said in his Senate testimony. “Much more importantly, it is about the message that the U.S. sends to Russia.”
“In our system, if we make a bad decision, we might lose an election. ... In your case, people die.” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.