Why would world leaders choose to deal with Putin as "normal" when he is clearly a murderous thug?

 

There have been reports surfacing of “mysterious” deaths of Russian oligarchs who have spoken out against Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, although “mysterious” deaths and outright assassinations of Putin’s opponents is hardly “news,” save to those for whom reports of his crimes are just more of the usual “noise” coming out of Russia. However, this isn’t “news” for those who have a knowledge of Russia’s history; what is “news” is that foreign leaders continue to engage with Putin as if he is “normal” and not what he is: a paranoid psychopath who apparently kills without moral considerations.

But first a history lesson. Political and ideological murders in Russia have a long history. Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great had their own eldest sons and heirs murdered. Nor should it be a surprise that murders and executions for “enemies of the state” who were guilty of little more than dissent—whether real or imagined—were the “norm” rather than the exception in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The purges and show trials of the 1930s—on top of the deliberate creation of famine conditions in Ukraine in which millions died—led to what is variously estimated to be between 700,000 and 1.2 million murdered or executed for “crimes” that rarely rose above what George Orwell would call “thought crimes” in 1984.  

The assassination of expatriates by the Putin regime may be infamous but is also hardly “news.” One of the principles in the founding of the Bolshevik revolution, Leon Trotsky, was assassinated by Stalinist agents in Mexico in 1940 after he was forced to relocate his exile there after various European stops considered him too “dangerous” as a focal point for Marxists in their own countries.

Trotsky’s “crime” against the Stalinist regime was that he had an “old school” vision of Marxism, meaning he believed that the “people”—the “proletariat”—should select their leaders who were accountable to them, while Stalin and his allies insisted on a “top-down” government, meaning a politburo selected its own members (or mainly by Stalin, who Lenin would regret giving such power to), thus making the masses accountable to the dictates of the government, which would be the recipe for rampant corruption and oppression.

So in the past twenty years we have seen Putin merely following the worst examples of his predecessors; they got away with it because they were “the law.” Where have we heard that before? Uh, Donald Trump, who basically repeated Richard Nixon’s line about if a president does it, it isn’t illegal: "Then I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president." That might not be legally correct, but throughout his presidency Trump certainly talked and behaved as if he thought that was true.

Like Trump, who was born into privilege and spent his life ordering people around, cheating business partners and ignoring laws that get in his way, Putin is no “politician” willing to compromise with others; he was a career intelligence operative whose “work” was to disseminate lies and “fix” the presence of problem people, which is part of his modus operandi for as long as he has been president. The poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in Britain, a former KGB and FSB agent who charged Putin with ordering killings of opposition and being the “terrorist” behind the 1999 apartment bombings which were used to raise his approval ratings and justify the war in Chechnya, is one such "fix."

Hundreds of people who have spoken out against Putin’s regime since he became president of Russia have become what one might call “excess” deaths. Journalists have been targeted in particular, but it is shocking the arbitrary way any in Russia can meet death merely for being a “thought criminal” who is no real threat to Putin; only the “potential” seems sufficient in the mind of a paranoid psychopath, justified by “history.”

In 2017, USA Today published a report that at least 38 people died under “mysterious” circumstances during Putin’s regime, but that is probably an underestimation given that many more than that number of Russian journalists have died of “unnatural” causes during that time. Poisoning seems to be a common method of inducing premature death, but the apparent staging of deaths by the “black-ops” Unit 29155 have been rather more “creative.”

For example, the strange deaths of seven oligarchs who had spoken out against the war in Ukraine include Sergei Protosenya, his wife and daughter in a rented villa in Spain; the wife and daughter were found stabbed to death, and Protosenya was found hanged. Perhaps in a “vacuum” this could be accepted as a murder/suicide; yet something similar occurred around the same time in Russia, where Vladislav Avayev, a former vice president of Gazprombank, was found shot to death along with his wife and daughter, again appearing to be a murder/suicide. Coincidence?

Maybe not. Or probably not. Vasily Melnikov, a billionaire in Russia who was head of the medical supply company MedStom, was discovered dead in his luxury apartment along with his wife and two young sons. Oligarchs Alexander Tyulyakov, Leonid Shulman and Mikhail Watford have also met untimely ends, and like the rest by alleged “suicide.”

Author John O’Neill, who has written about Stalin’s regime, asserts that Putin is merely following Stalin’s example, who besides staging assassinations and conducting executions of “thought criminals,” may also have murdered millions more not being counted through the machinations of the infamous Lab X, where various poisons were concocted to simulate “natural” deaths as early as 1921, and obviously such “experiments” continue to the present day; the victims of Putin’s poisons include former president and Ukrainian nationalist Viktor Yushchenko,  another attempted poisoning in the UK, this time of Sergie Skripal and his daughter Yulia, and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny.

Rumor had it that Stalin himself may have met death "prematurely" through poisoning; at the time he was contemplating a new "purge" of Russian-Jewish doctors who he blamed for his ill health, and his associates were becoming "concerned" about his mental state.

Anyways, the bottom line is that Putin is not ignorant of these incidents, and it is highly unlikely that Russian operatives are working without his approval or direct order. This is the thug the world must deal with, and this is how the world must view Putin. Perhaps "ordinary" Russians will tolerate his thuggishness, but that doesn't mean the rest of the world has to be poisoned by it.