Another Notch in Putin's Belt

Alexei Navalny, for years the greatest potential threat to Vladimir Putin's corrupt, iron-clad, despotic regime, died last week in a Siberian prison camp under very suspicious circumstances. He was in seemingly good health and good spirits right up until he went for a walk in the camp's yard, where he suddenly collapsed and died. According to Kremlin sources, Navalny died of "sudden death syndrome," which is a pretty good description of how Putin's enemies all seem to have died in the past; and there's no reason to believe that any current or future enemies of his will not meet their ends in the same way.
The Russian government is refusing to release the body to Navalny's family for two weeks; enough time to cover up any evidence of malfeasance.
As of this writing Putin has not commented on Navalny's death. He's likely been too busy cutting another notch in his belt. Of course Putin wasn't directly involved in the death of Navalny or of any of his other enemies. He is rich, powerful and intimidating enough that he can hire the 'best' thugs in Russia to do his dirty work for him.
As soon as the news of Navalny's death broke, memorials were set up around the world for him, including in Moscow - where the memorials were quickly dismantled and many of the demonstrators arrested. 'Vlad the Eliminator' may be sure that when his time comes - hopefully soon - he will not be mourned anywhere nearly as widely.

The list of Putin's suddenly-snuffed adversaries is long. Here are just some of the names corresponding to those notches in Putin's belt:

• Anna Politkovskaya, Russian journalist, writer and human rights activist, was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment block in central Moscow in 2006.
• Alexander Litvinenko, a British-naturalised Russian defector and former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) who was a prominent critic of Putin, was fatally poisoned with radionuclide polonium-210 in 2006.
• Stanislav Markelov, a Russian journalist, was shot to death in 2009 while leaving a news conference in Moscow, less than 800 metres from the Kremlin.
•  Anastasia Baburova, a journalist for Novaya Gazeta who tried to come to Markelov's assistance, was also shot and killed in the attack.
• Russian human rights activist Natalia Estemirova was abducted by "unknown persons" in 2009 from her home in Chechnya. Two witnesses reported they saw Estemirova being pushed into a car shouting that she was being abducted. Her remains were found with bullet wounds in the head and chest.
• Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who  helped uncover a $230 million tax fraud and evidence that Russian government officials were involved in carrying it out and then covering it up, died in a Russian prison in 2009. His family said crucial medical care was withheld, while a Russian presidential human rights commission report found evidence he had been beaten on the very day he died. (The Kremlin has always maintained that he died of heart failure.)
•  Alexander Perepilichny was a Russian businessman and whistleblower who died while jogging near London in 2012, after leaving Russia three years earlier. One of Perepilichny's life insurance companies ordered tests that detected a toxin from a Chinese flowering plant nicknamed "heartbreak grass" because its leaves trigger cardiac arrest if ingested.
• Boris Berezovsky was a Russian oligarch who fell out with his one-time protege Vladimir Putin and was granted asylum in Britain. His death in London in 2013 was, according to a postmortem examination conducted by the British authorities,  "consistent with hanging."
• Boris Nemtsov, a political opponent of Putin, was shot to death on  Moscow's Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in 2015.
• In that same year Russian oligarch Mikhail Lesin was found dead in his hotel room in Washington, D.C. Three years later, BuzzFeed published a leaked report written for the FBI by former spy Christopher Steele, which alleged that Lesin was bludgeoned to death by men working for an oligarch close to Putin. The report says the men were ordered to scare but not kill Lesin, but went too far.
• In 2018, Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence agent acting as a double agent for the British, and his daughter Julia, were poisoned by Novachok, a deadly nerve agent produced only in Russia.
• In August 2023, a business jet crashed  approximately 100 kilometres north of Moscow. Among the ten victims were Yevgeny Prigozhin and other key figures of the Wagner Group, a Russian state-funded private military company.  Prigozhin had led the Wagner Group rebellion two months earlier. Tracking data from the flight showed unusual altitude variations followed by a "dramatic descent" shortly before the plane crashed. Western intelligence reported that an explosion likely caused the airplane to crash.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. There are other proven or suspected victims of Putin, and it would be a major undertaking to try and list them all. One thing seems clear, though: all of those notches in Putin's belt must have weakened it so much that there's a real danger his pants will fall down.

image: Evgeny Feldman / Novaya Gazeta, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons