Sorry I misunderstood. I can see it now that you’ve explained. 🙂

And, as my mother (and grandmother, and great-grandmother used to say) says, and I say now too, two wrongs don’t make a right.

As Diana said.

Re the “classified information,” the government tried to stop the enquiry even happening through the courts. The court ruled the government didn’t have a case, and so the enquiry went ahead.

Well, “Russians are weird” was a kind of joking summary of what you’ve just said.

Although it’s exactly the way my wife (born in Russia, but left at the age of two) would put it.

I’ve kept a copy of the permalink to the debate, but I thought it was going a bit far to name her or link to it. 🙂

It’s an excellent article. There are a couple of points he gets a bit carried away in his criticisms, but on the whole I agree with him.

I was interested in this bit too:

But it was only after Russia’s passing of the 2006 Extremism Law, justifying extra-territorial killings of Russians making allegedly libellous statements about the government, that Vladimir Putin was able to hit back at a man who, days before he was poisoned, had accused him of being both a paedophile and the man behind the assassination of the journalist Anna Politkovskya.

I didn’t know about Russia’s Extremism Law. It’s absolutely chilling that a citizen can be legally killed in that situation.

Thanks for the recommendation – I’ve noticed that book being recommended to me on Amazon because of other stuff about Putin I’ve bought. It’s always hard to know whether a book is worth buying though.

I vaguely remember Litvinenko being arrested for something serious at some point, and his release seemed a bit suspect. I can’t help wondering if charges were dropped because he worked for MI6, or maybe as a recruitment bonus. Killing him in such a Russian way makes his info seem more credible – if he was just a conspiracy theorist of something, he wouldn’t be worth worrying about.

I found that one particularly shocking too. As you say, there’s no way to prove it definitively, but I think Putin ordered the hit. With Nemtsov, he crossed a line. I thought Nemtsov was sort of safe because he was so well known.

I don’t think Russians are weird, I think they’re in an information bubble. Most get their info from television, which Putin controls. The internet is controlled (though with a light enough hand it’s not always noticeable), and people are told constantly that the rest of the world hates them, especially the Americans, and they have to stick together. It’s master manipulation.

It’s been done fairly gradually too. If Nemtsov had been assassinated in 2005, there might have been a lot more questions asked, but ten years down the track and there’s been a managed shift in public sentiment. That’s my judgement anyway – could be completely off track of course!

The difference is systemitized corruption. Under Yeltsin, Russia began to head toward a liberal democratic society. Unfortunately, Yeltsin really made a mess of things. But, in the beginning, Putin made very good reforms, bringing on board Herman Gref, who did wonders for Russia’s economy. Putin even curbed the corruption of the oligarchs….but then he instead chose to take that power for himself. Under Putin, the corruption that already existed, was systemitized.

No doubt, the world of politics and war is a nasty, dark one but there is a stark difference between how things go down in Russia and how things go down in America.