The Russia connectionPutin’s Victims: A Long List Getting longer

Published 25 August 2020

Vladimir Putin’s intelligence operatives have killed many domestic critics of Putin – opposition politicians, journalists, investigative reporters, academics, artists – and more than a dozen Russian defectors, like Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. Russian intelligence operatives, however, have also killed Russians who were not outspoken critics of the regime, leading Russia experts to speculate that Putin has adopted a milder version of Stalin’s tactics of random killings in order to instill a generalized sense of fear and insecurity in the Russian elite. Below is a list of 16 politicians, businesspeople, and diplomats – and 122 journalists – who were killed, or whose death was arranged, by operatives of the Putin regime.

Vladimir Putin’s intelligence operatives have killed many domestic critics of Putin – opposition politicians, journalists, investigative reporters, academics, artists – and more than a dozen Russian defectors, like Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 (the attempt on Sergei Skripal and his daughter belongs in this category of assassinations).

Russian intelligence operatives, however, have also killed Russians who were not outspoken critics of the regime, leading Russia experts to speculate that Putin has adopted a milder version of Stalin’s tactics of random killings in order to instill a generalized sense of fear and insecurity in the Russian elite.

For example, Alex Oronov, 69, a Ukranian-born millionaire businessman with ties to both Donald Trump and the Russian business elite, has died on 2 March 2017 in unexplained circumstances. Oronov, a naturalized American citizen, ran a large agricultural business in his native Ukraine. Oronov also had family ties to Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer: Cohen’s brother, Bryan, was Oronov’s partner in an ethanol business in Ukraine (see “Ukrainian businessman with links to Trump, Russia dies in mysterious circumstances,” HSNW, 6 March 2017).

Oronov’s death was one of a series of mysterious deaths which have visited senior Russian businesspeople and diplomats in late 2016 and early 2017.

The short list of Putin’s victims would include:

Boris Nemtsov, 2015. In the 1990s, Nemtsov was one of the leaders of post-Soviet Russia’s “young reformers.” He became deputy prime minister and was, for a while, seen as possible presidential material — but it was Vladimir Putin who succeeded Boris Yeltsin in 2000. Nemtsov initially supported the choice, but he grew increasingly critical, and was pushed to the margins of Russian political life. In February 2015, military involvement in Ukraine, Nemtsov was shot four times in the back by an unknown assailant within view of the Kremlin. Putin took “personal control” of the investigation into Nemtsov’s murder, but the killer remains at large.