When U.S. President Joe Biden agreed that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “killer” in an interview in March, he was admitting the obvious.
Yet Western leaders are rarely so matter-of-fact towards Russian leaders, even during the Cold War.
But the facts are difficult to ignore: Putin’s regime is soaked in blood. Since 1999, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin tapped him as prime minister, Putin has unleashed a killing spree in Russia and abroad, including Ukraine and Syria. He is even implicated in assassinations of targets in the West.
When his victims are counted, Putin isn’t just a killer, but rahter a mass murderer. Putin-led invasions and mercenary attacks have killed tens of thousands of people.
Death toll
About 80,000 people, including up to 25,000 civilians, were killed in the Second Chechen War. Russia’s war against Ukraine, launched in 2014, has claimed the lives of more than 13,000 people, including 3,350 civilians.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also attributes 83,500 civilian deaths to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its allies, including Russia. An estimated 600,000 people have been killed in the decade-long Syrian Civil War.
Some of Putin’s critics have also accused him of killing his own people: Namely, orchestrating the 1999 apartment bombings in Russia, which killed 307 people.
There is evidence that Putin also ordered the assassinations of some of his personal opponents, 20 of whom were either killed or died in suspicious circumstances. Some of the murders involved the use of chemical and radiological weapons – something that blatantly violates not only multiple countries’ criminal codes but also international law.
In Russia, Putin has built a dictatorship and jailed numerous critics. Currently the Kremlin has at least 74 political prisoners in jail, as well as 304 people imprisoned for their religious beliefs, according to the Memorial human rights group.
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But so far the West has been reluctant to antagonize Putin.
Biden’s remark represents a rare exception in an international community that generally treats him as a normal head of state. Instead of holding him accountable for his crimes,, Western leaders choose appeasement.
“There is an ambiguous attitude towards Putin (in the West),” Ukrainian political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko told the Kyiv Post. “They don’t like him and believe him to be a murderer but, on the other hand, they have a pragmatic approach: They believe it’s better to negotiate with him to keep him from crossing the line.”
Putin has denied the accusations of murders, war crimes and corruption. But a look at his 21-year rule provides plenty of evidence of his atrocities.
The rise
According to his critics, Putin’s authoritarian mindset and Soviet nostalgia are deeply rooted in his work at the KGB – the secret police responsible for jailing and killing millions of Soviet citizens.
Putin joined the KGB in 1975, at the age of 23. According to murdered ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko and human rights lawyer Yuliy Rybakov, Putin fought against Soviet dissidents at the KGB. Putin denies this.
From 1985 to 1990, Putin served as a KGB officer in Dresden, East Germany. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he was involved in a standoff with German protesters who tried to take over the KGB headquarters in Dresden. He burned KGB documents in an apparent effort to cover up the secret police’s crimes in East Germany.
After returning to Russia, he got a prominent post in his hometown, St. Petersburg. In 1991-1996, Putin was the head of the city’s foreign affairs committee and a close ally of Anatoly Sobchak, then a liberal mayor. At the time, Putin adapted to the new political atmosphere by claiming to be a democrat.
In 1992, Marina Salye, a member of the St. Petersburg city council, launched an official investigation into Putin’s alleged corrupt dealings. Putin’s department unlawfully handpicked companies without tenders, and there was evidence of kickbacks, according to Salye’s findings. Israeli businessman Maxim Freidzon said in a 2017 interview that he had given a bribe to Putin in the early 1990s.
But the investigation led nowhere, and Putin’s rise continued.
Sobchak lost a mayoral election in 1996 and Putin moved to Moscow and became the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB’s successor, in 1998.
At the time, ailing and unpopular President Boris Yeltsin and his inner circle were looking for someone to succeed him, someone who could guarantee that they could keep their assets and remain immune from prosecution. Putin was chosen for the job and appointed as prime minister in August 1999 and acting president in December 1999.
At the same time, Chechen rebels invaded the nearby republic of Dagestan, and Russia sent troops to Chechnya.
Apartment bombings
In September 1999, terrorists blew up apartment blocks in Moscow and two other Russian cities, killing 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.
The attacks dramatically boosted social support for the war in Chechnya and helped Putin be elected president in 2000.
At the time of the attacks, the police said it had found sacks with hexogen, an explosive, and a detonator in an apartment building in the city of Ryazan. Media said FSB employees had put the explosive in the building but the FSB claimed it was a training exercise and the sacks were filled with sugar, not hexogen.
In 2002 former KGB and FSB officer Litvinenko published a book called “Blowing Up Russia,” in which he accused Putin and the FSB of orchestrating the apartment bombings to propel Putin to power. This version does not have unanimous support among Putin’s critics: Some back it, while others dismiss it as a conspiracy theory.
Liberal politician Sergei Yushchenkov and member of parliament Yury Shchekochikhin were key members of an independent commission that tried to investigate the terrorist attacks, including the allegations of the FSB’s involvement. Both of them were assassinated in 2003, while a lawyer hired by the commission to investigate the attacks, Mikhail Trepashkin, was jailed.
In 2006 Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium-210, a radioactive component of nuclear weapons, in London.
The British police charged Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB officer and current pro-Kremlin lawmaker, and businessman Dmitry Kovtun with murdering Litvivenko. In 2016, a British court concluded that Putin and Nikolai Patrushev, the former head of the FSB, “probably” ordered Litvinenko’s assassination.
Chechen war
The war with Chechnya helped Putin come to power and cement his authoritarian rule.
Up to 25,000 civilians were killed during the Second Chechen war in 1999-2009, according to Amnesty International. Russian troops targeted civilians in indiscriminate bomb attacks and took part in several massacres of civilians.
According to Amnesty International, thousands may be buried in unmarked graves in Chechnya, including up to 5,000 civilians who disappeared during the war. The bodies show signs of executions and torture.
Human Rights Watch classified the forced disappearances as crimes against humanity.
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, and some were summarily executed.
Killing off democracy
Since coming to power in 1999, Putin has never yielded. After his first two presidential terms expired in 2008, he installed his friend Dmitry Medvedev as a puppet president and became prime minister.
In 2012 he returned as president, claiming that the constitutional ban on a third term applied only to consecutive terms. Independent lawyers have disputed the claim, arguing that Putin’s third presidential term was unlawful and unconstitutional. In 2020 Putin got rid of term limits for himself altogether by changing the constitution through a rigged referendum.
According to independent election observers, there is overwhelming evidence that vote rigging has dramatically increased in Russian elections since 2000.
Although he started his presidency with some free market reforms, Putin has since gradually gotten rid of most democratic institutions, jailed his political opponents and eliminated civil liberties.
The turning point was 2003, when Putin’s opponent and oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was jailed on tax evasion charges. His Yukos oil firm was sold through a rigged auction and taken over by state oil firm Rosneft, which was run by Putin’s friends.
Georgia war
As Putin monetized his immense power, he also is pursuing his dream of resurrecting the Soviet empire. His military invasions of Georgia and Ukraine were violations of international law.
In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia and occupied two of its breakaway republics, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
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.
War with Ukraine
In 2014, Putin also illegally invaded and then annexed Ukraine’s Crimea – another violation of international law – and launched a military invasion of eastern Ukraine.
Russia and its proxies have been involved in extrajudicial executions and torture of prisoners in Ukraine, according to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Russian mercenary Arseniy Pavlov admitted to killing 15 prisoners in a recorded interview by phone with the Kyiv Post in 2015.
“I don’t give a fuck about what I am accused of, believe it or not. I shot 15 prisoners dead. I don’t give a fuck. No comment. I kill if I want to. I don’t if I don’t,” he said.
Human rights groups have also documented indiscriminate bombing, including the use of cluster bombs, by Russia and its proxies.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has claimed the lives of about 13,000 people, including 3,350 civilians, according to the United Nations.
Murder in the sky
Another crime for which Putin’s regime remains unpunished is the downing of Malaysia Airlines’ flight MH17 on July 17, 2014 in eastern Ukraine. All 283 passengers, most of them Dutch citizens, and 15 crew were killed.
In 2016 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 in the attack had been transported from Russia into Ukraine on the day of the crash, and then back into Russia after the crash, with one fewer missile.
The Buk came from the Russian 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade in Kursk, according to the investigation team. The Netherlands and Australian foreign ministers stated that they would hold Russia legally responsible for the crash.
In 2019 Dutch prosecutors charged four people, including three Russian citizens and one Ukrainian, with shooting down the airliner. One of them is Igor Girkin, a former Russian FSB officer who took part in the annexation of Crimea and triggered Russia’s war against Ukraine by seizing the city of Slovyansk in Donetsk Oblast in 2014.
Girkin was unrepentant when he admitted in 2014 to pulling the trigger on Russia’s war.
“If our team had not crossed the border (into Ukraine’s Donbas from Russia), everything would have ended in the same way as in Kharkiv and Odesa,” he said. “There would have been several dozens of killed and detained people, and (the conflict) would have ended.”
Syria war
Putin has also supported fellow autocrats in different countries, including Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro.
The Kremlin has backed the autocratic Syrian President Bashar al Assad since the Syrian Civil War began in 2011. Russia deployed troops in Syria in 2015. Assad has used chemical weapons during the war, and Russia has tried to whitewash his actions.
Amnesty International said that “Russia is guilty of some of the most egregious war crimes” in Syria it had seen in decades.
Specifically, Russia used 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.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights attributed 83,500 civilian deaths to the Assad regime and its allies, including Russia.
Western response
The West has responded to Russia’s interference in the U.S. elections, its war against Ukraine and the jailing of his main political foe Alexei Navalny in 2021 by imposing sanctions.
However, the current sanctions are unlikely to lead to the collapse of Russia’s economy or Putin’s regime, Russian political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin told the Kyiv Post.
Cutting Russia off from the SWIFT payment system would cripple the Russian economy, although the West is unlikely to do so, he argued.
“If they wanted to really hurt Putin, they would also freeze Putin’s personal accounts abroad,” he added.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has opposed antagonizing the Kremlin due to strong economic ties.
She has also defended the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline link between Russia and Germany via the Baltic Sea. The $11.6 billion pipeline bypasses Russia’s main natural gas transit route through Ukraine.
Biden was expected to toughen sanctions to stop completion of the pipeline, but so far has not expanded them. His predecessor, Donald J. Trump, even praised Putin and had a bromance with the Kremlin leader.
Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron has called for a reset with Russia.
“Putin skillfully uses contradictions between Western countries and has found their weak spots,” Fesenko said.
