EDITORIAL
Another Russian Journalist takes the Putin Plunge
Ivan Safronov
Call it “the Putin Plunge.”
Russian journalists have a habit of taking it.
In 2007, Kommersant‘s Ivan Safronov went out a fifth floor window in Moscow while working on a story about the sale of weapons by the Kremlin to Iran and Syria.
Then just last week, Olga Kotovskaya fell 14 floors in Kaliningrad, just one day after winning a court case to seize back her TV station from the Kremlin after the government moved in to silence her reporting on political corruption. The Guardian quoted Solomon Ginzburg, a deputy in Kaliningrad’s regional parliament:
Olga Kotovskaya
“I have no doubt at all that this was a political killing. It was murder. Olga was a strong, feisty woman. A year before her death, she came to me and said that a high-ranking official had urged her to drop her legal case.”
In both cases, the authorities attempted to claim the fall was suicide, even though there was absolutely no reason to believe either reporter wanted to check out.
Putin has been slaughtering journalists since his first days in office, so that now Russia is one of the very most dangerous places in on the planet for a journalist to work, ranking alongside nations that are actually at war. Not once has there been any serious effort to point the finger of blame at the Kremlin where it obviously belongs, and in most cases there hasn’t even been an effort to apprehend and prosecute the killer.
This is a fully-realized neo-Soviet state, liquidating anyone who dares to question its rule. Such blindness destroyed the USSR, and it will destroy Russia exactly the same way.
La Russophobe 
The Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations quotes Igor Rostov, Kotovskaya’s husband and former co-owner of Kaskad, as saying his wife was murdered.
“If I am found dead on the rails, do not believe I committed suicide,” he says.
Aleksei Simonov of the Moscow-based Glasnost Defense Foundation says, “There is not even an explanation as to why Kotovskaya was in the building from which she allegedly fell. The building had nothing to do with her; she had no reason to be there.”
http://www.rferl.org/content/The_Suspicious_Death_Of_Russian_Journalist_Olga_Kotovskaya/1893177.html
Local opposition activists were also categorical. “I do not have the slightest doubt that she was murdered. And she was murdered for her journalistic activities. I cannot imagine that a person who has won the main lawsuit in her life has decided to jump to her death from the 14th floor. The fact that violence against journalists and owners of media outlets has become the norm in the Kaliningrad region and is almost never punished should at least attract the attention of the authorities and the appropriate bodies,” Mikhail Chesalin, leader of the local division of Patriots of Russia and a member of the local parliament, told “Nezavisimaya Gazeta”. His colleague Solomon Ginzburg told “Nezavisimaya Gazeta” that Kotovskaya had sought his help a year ago, saying that a high-ranking official had urged her to stop taking part in the litigation involving the fate of Kaskad.
http://www.ifex.org/russia/2009/11/30/kotovskaya_death/
Mother says Chechen authorities kidnapped daughter
Danish Refugee Council worker missing for five weeks
Forty-year old Zarema Gaisanova, a native Chechen who worked for the Danish Refugee Council in the regional capital Grozny, was taken from her home on Oct. 31, human rights groups say.
London-based Amnesty International said in a statement that “it appears that law enforcement officials may have been responsible for (Gaisanova’s) abduction”.
Asya Malsagova, who heads a state council dealing with the rights of prisoners in Chechnya, said regional leader Ramzan Kadyrov, an ex-rebel turned Kremlin loyalist, was aware of the kidnapping but concrete details were unclear.
Amnesty said that prosecutors told Lida Gaisanova last month her daughter was alive.
http://www.kyivpost.com/news/russia/detail/54418/
@law enforcement
There’s no law there to enforce.
http://www.wunrn.com/news/2008/04_08/04_07_08/040708_russia_files/image001.jpg too.
Director of Russian charity shot dead
Today at 19:14 | Associated Press
MOSCOW (AP) — Russian investigators say the director of a charity that helps victims of political repression has been shot dead.
Investigators say 54-year-old Gennady Prudetsky was found dead in his car in the Siberian city of Kemerovo.
A statement issued Thursday by the federal Investigative Committee says investigators have not yet determined a motive for the Wednesday killing, but believe it could be related to the victim’s work at the local charity, which supports victims of political repression.
Russia has seen a wave attacks, many of them fatal, against human rights activists in recent years.
http://www.kyivpost.com/news/russia/detail/54786/
Gennady Prudetsky was the director of the Foundation to Protect the Rights of Victims of Repression and Convicts. He was 54 years old.
Nadezhda Ananyeva, a spokeswoman for the Kemerovo Oblast prosecutor’s office, told RFE/RL that an unidentified person called the police to report that there was a dead man inside a car on a street in Kemerovo.
Police later found Prudetsky’s body with numerous gunshot wounds.
He had survived an assassination attempt several years ago when unknown assailants tried to bomb his apartment.
http://www.rferl.org/content/Russian_Rights_Activist_Found_Shot_Dead_In_Kemerovo/1900468.html
Russian policeman convicted of killing journalist
Today at 11:15 | Associated Press
KARABULAK, Russia (AP) — A court in southern Russia has convicted a policeman in the 2008 killing of a journalist and sentenced him to two years in prison.
The victim’s relatives have reacted angrily, saying the sentence is too light.
Journalist Magomed Yevloyev, who was critical of regional officials, ran a Web site that reported on abuses, abductions and killings plaguing the southern Ingushetia province.
He was shot in the head in a police car after being detained as he stepped off a flight from Moscow in August 2008. Police say he was shot accidentally during a scuffle.
The court on Friday convicted Ibragim Yevloyev, the former head of the local police chief’s guard service, of involuntary homicide. The two men are not related.
The victim’s relatives insist that the killing was premeditated.
http://www.kyivpost.com/news/russia/detail/54856/
TWO YEARS?
The kremlin will let him out in a few months, for “good behavior”, and promote him for good behavior.
After the murders, Ivan Potupchik, who had formerly been an informer for the local OGPU, was officially employed in the mass executions of kulaks. Later, he was found guilty of the rape of a teenage girl and spent a short time in prison. After he was released, he was again employed by the OGPU, but received an assignment far from Gerasimovka.
Meanwhile, this is what the secular uncivilized savage pagan barbarians in the kremlin did to Ukrainian women and children{!}:
>>1932 Law of Spikelets
The common name came into use because peasants (including children) caught gleaning (hand-collecting the leftovers of grains or ‘spikelets’) in the collective fields after the harvest were arrested for “damaging the state grain production”, and would be shot.
The law was also known as the “Seven Eighths” Law (Закон ‘семь восьмых’, Zakon “sem’ Vos’mykh”“), because the date in Russian is written as 7/8/1932
I’m not surprised at all.
@The kremlin will let him out in a few months, for “good behavior”, and promote him for good behavior.
The killers of Yandarbiyev (GRU agents), after extradited to serve their prison sentences in Russia, ofcourse didn’t spend even one minute in prison back home.
The killer of “Hero of Russia” Yamadayev also in foreign country, who is wanted by Interpol, serves as a deputy head of Chechnya. (Here: http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/04ai7JW98R4UR/610x.jpg between Kadyrov and “the liberal” Medvedev. On his Interpol wanted sheet photo: http://www.interpol.int/public/data/wanted/notices/data/2009/68/2009_11968.asp he is alone.)
The killer of Litvinenko and an international dirty bomber, also internationally wanted, made a political career and was promoted.
The army general who, with TV cameras were running, ordered a Chechen man to be executed, after this became the “Hero of Russia”, was promoted, and they gave him the post chief of all Russian military and security forces in North Caucasus (“the joint group of forces”).
And so on. It’ sa criminal country, run by criminals – war criminals and ordinary criminals. A mafia (mafiya) state.
The kremlin gives a wrist slap for the intentional planned murder of Sergei Magnitsky. In a few months, the kremlin will give them a reward.
Kremlin sacks prison official after lawyer death
MOSCOW, Dec 11 (Reuters) – Moscow’s prison chief has been dismissed after an investigation into the death of a jailed lawyer for an equity fund whose relatives say he was denied medical treatment.
http://www.kyivpost.com/news/russia/detail/54903/
Pingback: What Liberals Must Learn From Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (Huffington Post) | Ukrainian Canadian