Graham Charles Lear
8 min readApr 9, 2018

So Putin never did it, he never orderd a hit on Sergei Skripal ,He is innocent as a newborn Lamb.

WHO ME ? PROVE IT
Forensic experts and police officers examine the scene following the killing of Denis Voronenkov in Kiev, Ukraine, Thursday, March 23, 2017

If you think Putin and Russia is innocent of all charges on the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury then think again. He has form for bumping off people that upset him or get close to the truth.

Let's take a look at the people who have died under Putin's rule.

Vladimir Kara-Murza is a prominent political opponent of Putin he is the author of two documentaries, They Chose Freedom and Nemtsov.

Nemtsov tells the story of Boris Nemtsov who a Russian physicist and liberal politician. Nemtsov was one of the most important figures in the introduction of capitalism into the Russian post-Soviet economy. in 2008, Nemtsov published in-depth reports detailing the corruption under Putin, which he connected directly with the President. He was was shot several times from behind as he was crossing the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow. Three weeks before he was assassinated he wrote in the Sobesednik news website that his 87-year-old mother was afraid Putin would kill him. Three weeks later he was assassinated.

Vladimir Kara-Murza happened to be a good friend of Boris Nemtsov it's one of the reasons why he made documentaries outlining Putin's involvement on not just on the murder of his good friend but also about many other aspects of the corruptness that Putin presides over.

On 26 May 2015, Kara-Murza was suddenly taken ill in Moscow during a meeting he had been to a restaurant had a meal then for two hours had had nothing else to eat or drink. He collapsed and at first they thought it was his heart. but treatment at a specialized cardiac clinic did nothing to arrest the symptoms. He was then diagnosed with poisoning. On 15 August 2015 Mikhail Khodorkovsky commented with delight that Kara-Murza had returned to work coordinating the Open Elections project. Kara-Murza is working to provide free and fair elections for the Duma.

Then on 2 February 2017, Kara-Murza was again hospitalized after the onset of the same symptoms as his prior illness. He was put in a medically-induced coma and was on life support Once more he recovered but this time he decided to go abroad for rehabilitation. His lawyer sent the Russian Investigative Committee a request to open a criminal case into the alleged poisoning. A similar request after the 2015 incident had been turned down without an explanation.

They tried it twice with poison on Vladimir Kara-Murza he survived.

Anna Politkovskaya was not so lucky she was poisoned and survived then two years later entered a lift and was promptly shot in the head four times that was on Putin’s birthday I am sure he toasted his birthday gift as Anna Politkovskaya was a pain in the neck to him as she wrote books criticising him and portraying him as a monster especially his role in the Second Chechen War. and the Beslan school hostage crisis in fact it was when she was covering that story and was criticizing Putin that she was poisoned.

Karinna Moskalenko was quite lucky, she is a Human Rights lawyer who funnily enough had represented Alexander Litvinenko who like Anna Politkovskaya had gone on record in criticising Putin on the Beslan school hostage crisis. In fact he went quite a lot further he accused Putin and the Russian secret services of actualy orchestrating the whole siege in order to toughen laws on terrorism and expand the powers of law enforcement agencies. There is a evidence that quite a few hostage takers were in custody of the FSB and then released He made the connection that they would never have been released and if they had they would have been under the most intense surveillance that would not have allowed them to carry out the Beslan attack unnoticed.

Karinna Moskalenko fell ill with suspected mercury poisoning she survived. Anyone connecting what is going on?

A former member of the Russian parliament is gunned down in broad daylight in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. A longtime Russian ambassador to the United Nations drops dead at work. A Russian-backed commander in the breakaway Ukrainian province of Donetsk is blown up in an elevator. A Russian media executive is found dead in his Washington, D.C., hotel room.

What do they have in common? They are among 38 prominent Russians who are victims of unsolved murders or suspicious deaths since the beginning of 2014, according to a list compiled by British journalist Sarah Hurst, who has done research in Russia.

The list contains 10 high-profile critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin, seven diplomats, six associates of Kremlin power brokers who had a falling out — often over corruption — and 13 military or political leaders involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, including commanders of Russian-backed separatist forces.

Twelve were shot, stabbed or beaten to death. Six were blown up. Ten died allegedly of natural causes. One died of mysterious head injuries, one reportedly slipped and hit his head in a public bath, one was hanged in his jail cell, and one died after drinking coffee. The cause of six deaths was reported as unknown.

Putin has long dealt with opponents harshly. Sen. Patrick Leahy, said in March that Putin “has murdered his political opponents and rules like an authoritarian dictator.”

Yet the list of fatalities — 36 men and two women — suggests that Putin’s alleged attacks on his critics and whistle-blowers are more extensive and lethal than previously known.

Not everyone who has a quarrel with Russian President Vladimir Putin dies in violent or suspicious circumstances — far from it. But enough loud critics of Putin’s policies have been murdered that Thursday’s daylight shooting of a Russian who sought asylum in Ukraine has led to speculation of Kremlin involvement.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called the shooting in Kiev of Denis Voronenkov, a former Russian Communist Party member who began sharply criticizing Putin after fleeing Russia in 2016, an “act of state terrorism by Russia.

Here is some more information on the killings

Boris Nemtsov, 2015

Police officers detain Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, center, during a rally against President Vladimir Putin’s government in St. Petersburg, Russia, Nov. 25, 2007

In the 1990s, Nemtsov was a political star 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 Putin who succeeded former president Boris Yeltsin in 2000. Nemtsov publicly supported the choice, but he grew increasingly critical as Putin rolled back civil liberties and was eventually pushed to the margins of Russian political life. Nemstov led massive street rallies in protest of the 2011 parliamentary election results and wrote reports on official corruption. He also was arrested several times as the Kremlin cracked down on opposition rallies. In Feb. 2015, just hours after urging the public to join a march against Russia’s military involvement in Ukraine, he 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.

Boris Berezovsky, 2013

Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky attends the launch of the Litvinenko Justice Foundation in London on April 3, 2007.

A self-styled tycoon who become a fixture in Yeltsin’s inner circle in the late 1990s, Berezovsky is believed to have been instrumental in Putin’s rise to power (including a media campaign that smeared Nemtsov). But Berezovsky was unable to exert the influence under the new president he had hoped. His falling out with Putin led to his self-exile in the United Kingdom, where he vowed to bring down the president. He also accused the Kremlin of orchestrating the killing of Alexander Litvinenko, a former intelligence officer and whistleblower poisoned to death in 2009. Berezovsky was found dead inside a locked bathroom at his home in the United Kingdom, a noose around his neck, in what was at first deemed a suicide. However, the coroner’s office could not determine the cause of death.

Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova, 2009

Markelov was a human rights lawyer known for representing Chechen civilians in human rights cases again the Russian military. He also represented journalists who found themselves in legal trouble after writing articles critical of Putin, including Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya, who was slain in 2006. Markelov was shot by a masked gunman near the Kremlin. Baburova, also a journalist from Novaya Gazeta, was fatally shot as she tried to help him. Russian authorities said a neo-Nazi group was behind the killings, and two members were convicted of the deaths.

Sergei Magnitsky, 2009

Lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in police custody in November 2009 after allegedly being brutally beaten, then denied medical care. He had been working for British-American businessman William Browder to investigate a massive tax fraud case. Magnitsky was allegedly arrested after uncovering evidence suggesting that police officials were behind the fraud. In 2012, Magnitsky was posthumously convicted of tax evasion, and Browder lobbied the U.S. government to impose sanctions on those linked to his death. The sanctions bill bears his name and has since been applied to rights abusers in other cases.

Natalia Estemirova, 2009

Natalya Estemirova was a journalist who investigated abductions and murders that had become commonplace in Chechnya. There, pro-Russian security forces waged a brutal crackdown to weed out Islamic militants responsible for some of the country’s worst terrorist attacks. Like fellow journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Estemirova reported on civilians who often got caught between these two violent forces. Estemirova was kidnapped outside her home, shot several times — including a point-blank shot in the head — and dumped in the nearby woods. Nobody has been convicted of her murder.

Alexander Litvinenko, 2006

Alexander Litvinenko was a former KGB agent who died three weeks after drinking a cup of tea” laced with deadly polonium-210 at a London hotel, as Business Insider wrote a year ago. “A British inquiry found that Litvinenko was poisoned by Russian agents Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, who were acting on orders that had ‘probably been approved’” by Putin. Russia refused to extradite them, and in 2015 the Russian president granted Lugovoi a medal for “services to the motherland.” After leaving the Russian Federal Security Service, Litvinenko became a vocal critic of the agency, which was run by Putin, and later blamed the security service for orchestrating a series of apartment bombings in Russia in 1999 that left hundreds dead. Russia’s invasion of Chechnya followed later that year — and with it, the rise to power of Putin. Berezovsky was suspected to be complicit in at least part of the plot to bring Putin to the Kremlin, but he later sought to implicate Putin for Litvinenko’s killing. Litvinenko also accused Putin ordering the murder of Politkovskaya.

Sergei Yushenkov, 2003

The affable former army colonel was a favorite of parliamentary reporters in the early 1990s, Sergei Yushenkov had just registered his Liberal Russia movement as a political party when he was gunned down outside his home in Moscow. Yushenkov was gathering evidence he believed proved that the Putin government was behind one of the apartment bombings.

Yuri Shchekochikhin, 2003

He was investigating the 1999 apartment bombings for Novaya Gazeta when he contracted a mysterious illness in July 2003. He died suddenly, a few days before he was supposed to depart for the United States. His medical documents were deemed classified by Russian authorities.

Graham Charles Lear

What is life without a little controversy in it? Quite boring and sterile would be my answer.