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Martin Dewhirst, Orders to kill: the Putin regime and political murder, International Affairs, Volume 94, Issue 1, January 2018, Pages 208–209, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iix268
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Extract
Some critics of President Putin, in Russia and elsewhere, rightly or wrongly regard him as a very accomplished liar, crook, kleptocrat and oligarch—but is he also an aider and abettor of terrorism and other manifestations of extremism? Obviously, a good place to examine this possibility would be The Hague, but in the meantime Amy Knight's book provides independent observers with much relevant material for a provisional assessment of the available evidence.
Knight's latest monograph is a very helpful collection of much of the non-classified information on some of Putin's most prominent alleged victims—both before and after he became president. Knight concentrates on the possibility of Putin being indirectly involved in the mysterious deaths of some of his persistent critics, such as Galina Starovoitova (d. 1998), Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin (d. 2003), Paul Klebnikov (d. 2004), Anna Politkovskaya and Aleksandr Litvinenko (d. 2006), Natalya Estemirova, Sergei Magnitsky, Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova (d. 2009) and Boris Nemtsov (d. 2015). One hopes that in an expanded, second edition, the author will discuss the strange demise of Anatoly Sobchak in 2000, as there are particularly strong grounds for thinking that Putin might have had some personal input into this particular tragedy. Orders to kill also speculates about the possible reasons for the suspicious deaths of Andrei Kozlov (d. 2006), and several more ambiguous figures such as Badri Patarkatsishvili (d. 2008), Alexander Perepilichny (d. 2012) and Boris Berezovsky (d. 2013). Knight, however, refrains from mentioning Mikhail Lesin (d. 2015), a former close accomplice of Putin, who just might have been thinking of defecting before dying from a succession of ferocious blows while on a short trip from one of his homes in California to Washington. Knight also provides information on the shady background of the Boston Marathon bombers.