I've always wondered: why poison? It doesn't always seem to kill the victim and makes it easy to identify the perps as state actors.
As others have said, identifying a state actor is a feature, not a bug. However, what others have neglected to point out, is that it's unreliable - and that is a feature, too. We can't easily identify the state actor. Polonium-210 pointed at Russia obviously, but Russia has also utilized dioxides (vs. Shchekochikhin), and opioids (fentanyl) (to wipe out the hostage-takers in the Dubrovka theater).
The result is that Russia sends a message: we will reach out and kill our critics and defectors.
Bullets don't have the same effect: a critic dies in his sleep. Was it a drop of fentanyl? Maybe. Maybe. The absence or presence of poison will be speculated on; the absence or presence of bullets is clear-cut.
Through the use of poisons which vary in their ability to point the finger at Russia, any death of a critic that could plausibly be linked to a poisoning now raises the specter of Russian intervention. The result is that their psychological warfare is extended far beyond their actual reach.
The KGB/FSB has always had a very significant attention to psych-ops. Their actions should not be interpreted strictly at face value.
> wouldn't have been satisfying or vengeful enough
You know this how ?
Alexander Litvenenko springs to mind, followed by Viktor Yushchenko, Alexander Perepilichny, Anna Politkovskaya (later shot to death), Vladimir Kara-Murza (twice!), the Skripals, Georgi Markov (Ricin... nasty), Karinna Moskalenko, and on and on.
I know this is a common oversimplification when talking about governments, but please, could we at last use "Kremlin" instead? Russia is a large country with many people just like us, who want to live, love and have a wonderful time. Sure, at times the public opinion is stirred when some atrocities are reported and you can hear some vocal groups online, but Russians are not different from any other nation in this respect.
Their leaders, however, are a different story. You could say Russians have had bad luck with respect to their rulers for centuries. When you look back at what Lenin, Stalin and others did, Putin starts to look like a savior. But they all have a certain attitude and ambitions. So could we please stop saying "Russia" when we don't mean Russian people at all, and common Russians are actually victims of bad policy of their rulers.
I am a US citizen, my birth nation has "elected" two presidents who failed to win the popular vote. 2% of my fellow citizens are unable to vote due to felony convictions. On top of this, the practice known as gerrymandering is essentially carte blanche for a state's ruling power to ensure continuous victories due to the complicated nature of an inconsistent federalist voting system.
At least with the US system, the rules and loopholes (as stupid as they are) are transparent, known, and understood ahead of time. There's no funny business behind the curtain.
In Russia, elections are secretly manipulated by the state. The US is a sometimes-dysfunctional democracy, but Russia doesn't have a democracy at all.
You're speculating as to the state of Russia's democracy. Have you any specific proof of your allegations? I'm guessing your proof lays primarily with that which is published in the media, and the strong statements / research which come out of NATO and other anti-Russian establishments?
I can't believe people would vote for Trump, but let's face it, they did because they believed his economy promises. I can't believe people voted for Putin, but Russia's economy has flourished under his reign, before him, people literally starved to death. I can't believe people vote for Erdogan, but Türkiye's economy is magnitudes stronger and fairer than it was before the AKP reign. Perhaps these democracies are working as intended, and people just cast short-sighted, greed-driven votes?
I'm sure this is compounded by voter intimidation, limits on free speech, etc.
We have a long way to go in the US and Russia until every person is directly represented by either themselves or someone they ideologically agree with. Winner take all democracies are certainly better than aristocracies or dictatorships, but still result in the misrepresentation of huge portions of the population.
Just making him "really sick" doesn't make much sense, I think. Especially when you consider someone unrelated did die after being exposed.
And, well, I'm just not very convinced of the "almost definitely ordered or approved by Putin" part, nor the "Putin and other government officials have spoken at length about killing traitors no matter where they go" piece. I have never seen evidence of the former, and honestly never saw or heard the latter either.
Polonium has no side effects other than radiation poisoning which can't be detected outside the body. To diagnose it, one would have to go looking for trace amounts in the body or in contaminated areas. If the poisoners weren't aware of the extreme sensitivity of alpha-particle detection -- reliably accurate to the single particle level -- they might have thought polonium would be undetectable and untraceable. Or they might of thought nobody would ever think to look for it. By some accounts, they almost didn't.
They used Carfentanil (100x more potent than fentanyl) to wipe them out. Unfortunately medics didn't have enough antidote on hand to reboot all people.
Which is what makes it useful as an intimidation tactic.
Way more lethal, way more collateral, quite obvious to identify as the act of a state actor, still common practice barely anybody takes issue with.
The closest comparison I think you could validly make would be something like the harsh treatment of Chelsea Manning or Reality Winner (or Drake, or Snowden, etc). None of which were taken out with poison or a Hellfire missile.
(Edit: that’s not to excuse the treatment of those people either.)
Just because many people have blind trust in the US government and the validity of its kill list aka "disposition matrix" [0] doesn't change the basic injustice of the act, which is just as unjust as poisoning some "enemy of the state".
The international laws and human rights broken in both cases are exactly the same, the only difference is the methodology of the final "execution".
> None of which were taken out with poison or a Hellfire missile.
It's extremely naive to assume we know every drone victim ever, it's not like the US drone program is a shining beacon of transparency.
The US drone program does not target US citizens who speak up, protest, or embarrass the president of the USA, at the behest of just the president.
(Stating the obvious, but that’s not a defense of the drone program. You’ve outlined its problems. But it’s just clearly not the same thing.)
How do you know that? Does the US publish its list? No, it doesn't, so you are making that statement on literally nothing but good faith.
While at the same time you use bad faith to frame the Russian version as something where Putin personally orders people killed for slighting him or some other mundane reason.
The reality is both are killing "enemies of the state", justified and regulated by their own, internal, rulesets and governmental institutions. They and others have been doing so openly, and covertly for decades. Heck, this kind of stuff even has been glorified as a pop-culture export from the UK as "the agent with a license to kill".
In that context, there's literally no difference if it's an Obama, Trump, Putin or their UK equivalent giving the final "okay" or if the target is a US/UK/Russian national who's a terrorist/pedophile/traitor/whatever.
It's about the lack of accountability, the lack of due process, the lack of recourse. All these issues exist regardless of the US, Russia or anybody else doing something like this.
In that context, the US drone war is pretty much the overt manifestation of a practice that used to be kept covertly due to its inherent controversy. But in the zeals of a war on terror, where even torture became openly condonable, too many people have lost their moral compass.
How do you know that?
Well, there's simple occam's razor - if drone strikes were doing this, we'd probably have heard about it. On the other hand we have a rising body count of journalists, artists, and ex-spies with real names and histories.
No matter how you feel about drone strikes, you can't compare these things.
How do you get evidence that you are on a kill list anyway? The lists are top secret, maintained by world class intelligence agencies...
There is no reason for the US to publicly state if he is on any kill list or not technically.
It's true that drones tend to be military rather than espionage assets, and as insignia-bearing military hardware in a designated battle zone they're legally equivalent to a sniper successfully killing a distant target. However battlefield snipers generally make opportunistic choices based on tactical considerations, with little regard to the identity of their targets. A great many drone attacks begin with intelligence about a specific target and then deploy the resources to eliminate that person, which for me puts it closer to assassination. (This is an idiosyncratic definition and I doubt it lines up with accepted laws of war.)
Is killing a civilian who uses words to critique a government not different than killing an enemy who is at war with a government?
Maybe drones are terrible way to accomplish the latter (too many civilian collateral damage).
Exactly for these reasons:
>It doesn't always seem to kill the victim and makes it easy to identify the perps as state actors.
Quick and effortless death by a bullet don't terrify peons as much as death after weeks of excruciating agony.
In this case, it is also to send intimidation message to the country hosting them: hey look, we just wetted a man guarded by a squadron of crack bodyguards on your soil, now, think what we can do to you
Things that can be so 'easily' attributed to a given state actor can also then be used to try to frame said actor. Look at all the evidence, now obviously completely fake, that magically appeared when we wanted to 'prove' Iraq had WMD, even though they did not. For that matter look at the list of United States involvement in regime change [1] which is gradually turning into a novel. We make no secret, or at least declassification makes no secret, of overthrowing democratically elected governments, falsifying evidence to hurt sovereign nations, complicity to support of assassination of 'innocent' individuals, and lots of other great stuff.
I think people don't understand that propaganda doesn't mean some crackly speaker in a third world nation spewing daily praise for the divine leader. It comes and all shapes and forms, and the US is actively involved in domestic propaganda that ensures we never really appreciate all the awful things we do. In a way we, as in our intelligence agencies, are probably protected by their own impudence. Many of the things I'm listing even I have trouble believing we'd do, yet declassified documents and open acknowledgement make it complete and crystal clear that we do.
The point of this is not to say whether any party or another was involved in whatever event, but rather that trying to gauge things as an outsider based on the filtering of a news media which hungers both for clicks and war is unlikely to yield anything remotely resembling an educated opinion. We can even look to the history of Pussy Riot or this case as further examples. The victim here is not a member of Pussy Riot. His ex wife was a member. And the band themselves were not arrested for anything they said, but their behavior. They decided to stage a 'guerilla concert' inside a cathedral obviously completely against the wishes of the church and without their permission. They were charged with 'holliganism motivated by religious hatred' and sentenced to 2 years. They were released early on amnesty from the Russian duma/congress after serving most of their sentence. [2] Quite amazing what a different picture was spun by the media when all this was happening.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
1. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/15/uks-claims-q...
2. https://www.businessinsider.in/British-military-scientists-c...
3. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-russia-stockpiles...