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EXCLUSIVE
Putin a killer? Let us count the ways
Elina Kent: Russia has been making several moves that has Ukraine, NATO, and Western spheres on the lookout for. From building up Russian troops on Ukraine’s eastern border, an unusually high number of Russian fighter and bomber flights near allied airspace, and three nuclear-armed Russian submarines punching through several feet of ice in the Arctic.
US President Joe Biden also sat down with ABC news journalist George Stephanopoulos for a Good Morning America interview aired on the 17th of March, where he was asked about Russian President Vladimir Putin, and what consequence he may face for allegedly directing efforts to swing the 2020 U.S. presidential election in Donald Trump’s favor.
George Stephanopoulos: You know Vladimir Putin. You think he is a killer?
Joe Biden: Mhm, I do.
GS: So what price must he pay?
JB: A price he’s going to pay, you will see shortly.
The U.S. President also told Putin that the Russian president had no soul, to which Putin responded with “we understand one another.”
The Kremlin was furious with Biden’s statement, describing it as “very bad,” and recalled the Russian ambassador to “analyze what needs to be done” about the countries’ relations.
The day after the ABC interview, Putin had this to say:
Vladimir Putin: И вот знаете я вспоминаю в детстве во дворе когда спорили с друг другом мы говорили так: Кто как обзывается тот так и называется
Putin here says “When I was a child, when we argued in the courtyard, we said the following: “He who said it, did it,’”.
Later, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said during a Thursday press briefing that Biden did not regret making the comment during a Wednesday interview with ABC News, which she described as a “direct answer to a direct question. in “
Welcome to the Kyiv Post Podcast, where you can tune in to stories that give you a deeper understanding of Ukraine.
I’m your host Elina Kent. I’m a multimedia producer and lifestyle journalist here at the Kyiv Post.
We are joined by Oleg Sukhov to discuss the front page story in this week’s Kyiv Post issue, Vladimir Putin: Killer on the loose. Welcome Oleg.
Oleg Sukhov: Hello, thank you for having me.
EK: There are many crimes that Putin is allegedly responsible for. How would we even start with counting them?
OS: Well, there is plenty of evidence that Putin’s regime has unleashed an unprecedented killing spree in Russia, Ukraine and the West.
Some murders of Putin’s opponents involved targeted use of banned chemical weapons – something that blatantly violates not only the Criminal Code but also international law.
Alexei Navalny, Putin’s main political foe, is a good example.
EK: After Russian agents failed to kill him, Navalny returned to Russia and was immediately jailed, and claims he is being tortured. How often would you say this has occurred?
OS: In total, about 20 opponents of Putin have been killed or died in suspicious circumstances.
EK: Now this is not even counting the military aggression Putin unleashed in Georgia, Ukraine, Crimea, and Syria. So we can confidently say that there are many more victims of Putin’s crime than just 20 people here.
OS: Yes, currently the Kremlin keeps at least 74 political prisoners in jail, as well as 304 people imprisoned for their religious beliefs, according to the Memorial human rights group.
In Russia itself, Putin has built a highly authoritarian dictatorship, benefitting by giving huge chunks of Russia’s economy to his friends and receiving generous donations from them.
EK: The article starts with Putin’s beginnings as a KGB agent in both Russia and East Germany back in the late ‘80s. It’s widely believed that Putin’s authoritarian mindset and Soviet nostalgia come from his deeply rooted work at the KGB – the secret police responsible for jailing and killing millions of Soviet citizens.
OS: And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which Putin has said “was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.” He returned to St. Petersburg in 1990 where he was the head of St. Petersburg’s foreign affairs committee and a close ally of then St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak.
EK: Putin first saw a meteoric rise in power in 1998 after moving to Moscow and becoming the head of the Federal Security Service, the FSB. The FSB is essentially the successor to the KGB
OS: At the time, President Boris Yeltsin was looking for a man to succeed him and guarantee his and his inner circles assets and immunity from prosecution. Putin was chosen for the job and appointed as prime minister in August 1999, and acting president in December 1999.
It was at this time that Chechen rebels invaded the nearby Republic of Dagestan, and Russia sent troops to Chechnya.
EK: Another infamous event that propelled Putin to power was the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow and two other Russian cities that killed 307 people. According to Russian courts, the terrorist attacks were organized by Chechen-based Arab Islamists and carried out by 18 people – mostly from the North Caucasus.
OS: It was these attacks that dramatically boosted support in Russian society for the war in Chechnya and helped Putin to be elected president in 2000.
Then in 2002, former KGB and FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko and historian Yury Felshtinsky published a book called “Blowing Up Russia,” in which they accused Putin and the FSB of orchestrating the apartment bombings to propel Putin to power.
Although, this version does not have unanimous support among Putin’s critics: some support it, while others dismiss it as a conspiracy theory.
EK: Key members in an independent commission that tried to investigate the terrorist attacks and allegations of the FSB’s involvement, politician Sergei Yushchenkov and member of parliament Yury Shchekochikhin, were both assassinated in 2003, while the lawyer hired by the commission to investigate the attacks, Mikhail Trepashkin, was jailed.
OS: Later, in 2006 Litvinenko, one of the co-authors of “Blowing Up Russia,” was poisoned with Polonium-210, a component of nuclear bombs, in London.
10 years later a British court concluded that Putin and Nikolai Patrushev, former head of the FSB, “probably” ordered Litvinenko’s assassination.
EK: The war with Chechnya helped Putin to come to power and cement his authoritarian rule.
Up to 25,000 civilians were killed during the second Chechen war, according to Amnesty International. It’s reported that Russian troops targeted civilians in indiscriminate bomb attacks and took part in several massacres of civilians.
Thousands may be buried in unmarked graves in Chechnya, including up to 5,000 civilians who disappeared during the war, according to Amnesty International. The bodies that have been found show signs of summary executions and torture.
Human Rights Watch groups have classified the forced disappearances as a crime against humanity.
But that’s not all, during the war, Russia also set up a system of concentration camps in Chechnya, called “filtration camps.” According to the Memorial human rights group, 200,000 people passed through the camps and were subjected to beatings and torture, with some of them being summarily executed.
EK: Since coming to power in 1999, Putin has never really let go of it has he?
OS: Once his first two presidential terms expired in 2008, he installed his friend Dmitry Medvedev as an essential puppet president and while becoming prime minister himself.
But then in 2012, he returned as president, claiming that the constitutional ban on a third term applied only to consecutive terms. In fact, independent lawyers disputed this claim and believe that his third term was unconstitutional.
Then in 2020, Putin got rid of the term limits for himself altogether.
EK: How was he able to do that?
OS: He did so through a heavily rigged referendum on changing the constitution.
That’s what he’s done time and time again. Since Putin’s initial rise to power, he has gradually gotten rid of most democratic institutions, jailed his political opponents and eliminated civil liberties in order to keep his position.
EK: In the article we mention Putin’s palace. What is “Putin’s palace”?
OS: Well back in 2000, Putin’s son-in-law, Kirill Shamalov, asked oligarchs to channel money to an offshore firm effectively owned by Putin, which started building a palace for Putin in the Black Sea resort of Gelendzhik.
EK: This is what opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, released an investigative report about the palace in January of this year.
OS: Yes, it showed that Putin’s friends and allied businessmen, as well as state firms Rosneft and Transneft, channeled a total of 100 billion rubles which amounts to 1.3 billion U.S. dollars to build the palace – something that Navalny called “the world’s largest bribe.”
Putin has denied owning the palace, and his friend Rotenberg claims that he built it as a hotel, and not as a palace for Putin.
EK: Let’s talk about the Kremlin’s involvement in Georgia.
OS: As Putin monetized his immense power, he started to plan his dream of resurrecting the Soviet empire.
He started by invading Georgia and occupying two of its breakaway republics, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008.
Russian troops attacked fleeing civilians, bombed civilian population centers and used cluster bombs. Amnesty International accused Russia of deliberately killing civilians, which is a war crime. A total of 228 Georgian civilians were killed.
Russia and its proxies were also engaged in plundering, kidnappings and ethnic cleansing.
EK: The Kremlin’s invasions of both Georgia and Ukraine have been described and recognized by human rights groups as military aggression and violations of international law.
Following Russia’s invasion of Georgia, Putin in 2014 illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimea and launched a military invasion of eastern Ukraine.
OS: Russia and its proxies have been involved in extrajudicial executions and beating and torturing prisoners in Ukraine, according to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
We also had Russian mercenary Arseniy Pavlov admitted to killing 15 prisoners in a recorded interview on the phone with the Kyiv Post back in 2015.
EK: Russia’s war against Ukraine has claimed the lives of approximately 13,000 people, including 3,350 civilians.
OS: Another crime for which Putin’s regime remains unpunished is the downing of Malaysia Airlines’ MH17 flight on 17 July, 2014 in eastern Ukraine. All 283 passengers, with most being Dutch citizens, and 15 crew were killed.
So the Dutch-led Joint Investigation team concluded that the aircraft had been shot down by a Russian Buk missile fired from an area controlled by Russian proxies. It also found the Buk missile system used had been transported from Russia into Ukraine on the day of the crash, and then back into Russia after the crash, with one missile less than it arrived with.
EK: Another country that Putin has caused thousands of deaths in is Syria.
OS: The Kremlin has backed Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad since the Syrian Civil War began in 2011 and deployed troops in Syria in 2015. While Assad uses chemical weapons during the war, Russia continues to whitewash his actions.
EK: Amnesty International said that Russia is guilty of some of the most egregious war crimes in Syria it had seen in decades.
OS: Specifically, Russia uses cluster bombs and white phosphorus and carried out air strikes on densely populated civilian areas. Russian warplanes also deliberately destroyed hospitals and targeted rescue workers.
In total, the Assad regime and its allies, including Russia, are responsible for an attributed 83,500 civilian deaths according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
EK: One of the most recent conflicts that Russia has had with the West is the interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
A total of 13 Russians, including Putin’s ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, have been indicted for election interference in the U.S.
Other than that, what has been the West’s response to Russia’s interference in the U.S. election, its war against Ukraine and the jailing of Alexei Navalny?
OS:The West has imposed sanctions in response to Russia’s crimes and interference. However, these sanctions are unlikely to lead to the collapse of Russia’s economy or Putin’s regime.
EK: Considering Putin’s aggressive actions, why has the West been so reluctant to have a or a more intense response to the Kremlin?
OS: So Putin is using a wide network of useful idiots and paid agents in the west to promote his agent. Western countries are reluctant to antagonize Russia due to its size, military might, and lucrative trade. They also think it’s better not to push too hard against the Kremlin to leave room for negotiations.
EK: What would it take to effectively punish Putin for his actions?
OS: So the only way to stop Putin’s killing spree is to impose truly crippling and painful sanctions. For example freeze the foreign accounts that are effectively controlled by Putin through proxies, cut Russia off the SWIFT payment system or introduce an embargo on Russian oil.
EK: Well thank you so much for coming on and talking about this week’s Kyiv Post article.
OS: Thank you for having me.
EK: That was this week’s episode of the Kyiv Post podcast. I’m your host Elina Kent. You can subscribe to our podcast on all streaming platforms and follow along on our website. Stay safe, stay home and subscribe to the Kyiv Post.
