The Suspected Poisoning of Alexey Navalny, Putin’s Most Prominent Adversary | Hacker News Reader

The Suspected Poisoning of Alexey Navalny, Putin’s Most Prominent Adversary

newyorker.com

318 pointsjseliger184 comments

I remember an essay a few years ago (it was the Ukrainian poisoning?) where the author essentially said that Russia's brand has basically been spoiled for outsiders. (political brand certainly, but maybe overall as a country).

As in, Russia is no longer a trustworthy seeming, interesting, attractive place to want to go visit or collaborate with or be associated with.

I mean, of course it depends on the level of detail you're dealing with and who exactly you're associating with. But for me, a general observer, Russia certainly seems to have gotten a history of doing and being the source of shady things.

Even aside from that, and this is probably skewed by the history books focusing on the oddest parts of history -- Russia always reads like an odd, outlier place in history. Or maybe it's the Russian literature. Always something strange, or depressing going on there.

What's up with that?

I imagine the geographic environment has something to do with it.

Like, lots of resources and consequently failure to move from extensive to intensive growth mindset?

No, just bleak, cold, depressing, vast spaces that make you feel meaningless.

Their history is part European and part Asian. They have history in both continents and cultures. They've always been familiar yet different.

I think it probably seems like an outlier from a euro-centric (in a more literal sense, not in the pejorative sense) point-of-view because it is, in general, close enough to European cultures to be similar but distant enough to be distinct. Whereas other cultures/histories may be easier to bucket as "clearly distinct" and therefor not outliers.

"uncanny valley" of euro-centrism? haha.

There always were a lot of propaganda involved since forever. Even now Russia is demonised in Western Media, mostly quite unfair.

Can you give an example where Russia is portrayed unfairly?

I too am interested in examples. Typically, instead I see straw man “western governments do bad things too” to deflect.

You may start with this article https://medium.com/@dominicbasulto/russophobia-and-the-dark-...

It has some great images, especially in the final part.

That's negative portrayal of a violent corrupt dictatorship.

It started long before Putin and long before communists.

But things changed - Russia is much more known - while something remained the same - perception of the threat. Only now there are causes for that, so the article isn't accurate, portraying West as being "unnaturally" negative to Russia. West is negative for specific reasons, something which the article fails to address.

I think I read similar piece when they tried to shuffle their shooting of MH-17 and point the finger on Ukraine. Turns out to be propaganda as well.

How about this https://www.polygon.com/2019/10/30/20938550/call-of-duty-mod...

Tl;dr American army did carnage, the (one of most popular) game portraits that Russians did that

Or entire company of heroes 2 controversy

This is pure propaganda

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. That's an awful story.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on Russians in 2017:

"...the Russians, who typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor..." [1]

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/james-clapper...

Says the habitual liar James Clapper who verifiably lied under oath several times.

Was he punished for it?

Of course not. None of these deep state fucks are ever punished for anything.

Any action movie where the bad guys are stereotypical Russians? The way Russians and their culture are disparaged in media? I remember reading a WaPo article where some old lady was telling political canvassers to fuck off, and the entire time the article was fixating on her "Russian accent" and saying things like "this isn't russia we have democracy here". Really despicable racism.

Why would they demonize a place that throws doctors out of windows, poisons political opponents, kills journalists, and has a horrible reputation for LGBT rights?

Weird, right? /s

Not to mention actively trying to meddle with US elections.

And Brexit, and French and German elections, and shoot down Dutch airlines, etc.

You see, when anything go wrong in the world it's Russia's fault:) Especially if someone loses some elections - blame Russia 100% of the time.

Except... those things explicitly are Russia's fault. You can keep pretending Russia is a benevolent member of the international community all you want, but that simply does not make it true.

I’ve previously heard that claim about Brexit, but not about the other three.

Even then, despite being so Remain-y I moved to Berlin, I don’t see how Russia made enough of a difference to count as successfully interfering compared to all the decisions taken by Cameron up to the day of the referendum itself.

Well, the US is since WWII meddling with elections in other countries. And not only that but actively toppling foreign governments. The few millions some Russians may have spent on ads are a drop in the sea compared to the billions and billions that PACs and SuperPACs have spent.

Well Saudi Arabia is hundred times worse than all we have in Russia on every point you mentioned. But guess who get all the sanctions?

Saudi Arabia exports oil but apart from that is generally just completely irrelevant. It is a terrible, despotic regressive craphole, but it doesn't have context enough in the world to come up a lot.

To the dead reply to me - lol. Saudi Arabia's geopolitical power is entirely predicated on the US acting in its interest, which was a premise that only held when the US was dependent on oil imports.

Saudi Arabia's economy is non-existent and hyper-unproductive, and its military is farcical. While it has some modern hardware, it has F-15s being staffed by profoundly incompetent princlings (just another example of the broken nature of the society, where it is the absolute inverse of a meritocracy. Incompetence and nepotism from top to bottom).

Saudi Arabia is irrelevant, unless maybe you're some Indian guy looking for a job where you live in servitude as a slave in some foreign nation. When they do deplorable things it just doesn't get a lot of notice because it's entirely expected. They got to prance around with an imagined importance when they could squeeze the oil spigot, but now...eh. Those days are long gone.

Back in 2004, I did some consulting work for a manufacturer of Identification Friend-Foe (IFF) equipment. One of my colleagues had to go in and replace an IFF transponder on a Saudi military boat after its commander (a minor member of the royal family) decided, during the First Gulf War, to take it out of port despite knowing the IFF transponder was not working. A British RAF Tornado mistook the boat for Iraqi after it failed to auto-respond the pilot's IFF interrogation message. One HARM anti-radiation missile later, and anything near or behind the boat's radar dish looked like Swiss chesese, including the IFF transponder and pretty much everything in the mess hall. My colleague said that the mess hall looked like someone walked in with a shotgun and a ton of shells and just started blasting in all directions.

That commander had no business being in charge of a lemonade stand, much less a military vessel, and I'm told such nepotism is rampant in the Saudi military. People who have been isolated from all consequences of their actions for their whole lives tend to make terrible leaders.

Most of the current sanctions against Russia were a direct response to Russia's paramilitary invasion of a peaceful neighbor and theft of a large portion of their country.

If Saudi Arabia were to commit a comparable offense, I assure you they'd face a comparable response, or worse (remember what happened to Saddam Hussein).

You don't consider the situation in Yemen comparable?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian-led_intervention...

What Saudi Arabia has done in Yemen is a war crime in my opinion. But it's also part of an ongoing proxy war against Iran, whose government has made it clear that the goal is to destabilize the Saudi regime. So no, not comparable to Russia's ongoing attempt to reassemble its lost Soviet empire by destabilizing and invading neighbors who pose no threat to it.

Go read that wikipedia article you posted. It links to a good explanation of the Iran-Arab proxy conflict.

Crimea is also part of an ongoing proxy conflict between NATO and Russia, where NATO seeks to encircle the latter. The wars with Ukraine and Georgia were about maintaining buffer states (And to serve as a warning to the rest), rather than reassembling an empire.

Or at least, the facts can line up with this interpretation.

Maintaining a buffer is exactly why the Soviets annexed half of Europe after WWII, and spent the next half century brutally oppressing the populations therein. That's the whole point. But regardless, this is such a silly semantic quibble. Who cares why Russia wants to reassemble its empire? The international community is understandably alarmed by Russia's actions, and naturally care little about Putin's justifications.

> Crimea is also part of an ongoing proxy conflict between NATO and Russia, where NATO seeks to encircle the latter.

Fuck, this again? Go ahead and connect the dots for me. Explain what specific actions on the part of NATO, or the countries that have requested membership in NATO, were responsible for Russia suddenly invading a neighbor country that posed no threat to it, forcibly annexing a large part of it, and maintaining a ruinous and deadly guerilla conflict in much of the rest.

Let me reverse that question.

What specific actions of NATO lead you to think that its ambitions for Russia in the 2010s differ from its ambitions for the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s?

What has changed since the Cold War, in those ambitions? What specific actions has NATO taken that make it clear that those ambitions have changed? What reassurance is Russia expected to see that encirclement, containment, and isolation is not the goal of the West? I can't see a single bloody one.

We're going down the exact same road again, the only difference is that the front line is now 300 miles further east. Which is very comforting for Czechs, and Hungarians but unfortunately, far less so for Ukranians.

(Oh, and to answer your question, I think 'US Army bases in Poland' is a pretty good, solid example of why Russia feels threatened. Had the War in Donbas not happened, as likely as not, we'd have been seeing US Army bases in Crimea today. It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, though. I advise that the best way to win for the buffer states is to either adopt neutrality, or, barring that, to not antagonize the side that's being backed into a corner.)

You're asking for proof of a negative? Proof that NATO isn't nefariously plotting Russia's demise? And "encirclement"? Really? The borders with NATO countries comprise like five percent of Russia's total border length. If NATO is trying to encircle Russia, they're doing a really shitty job.

Honestly, I'm not interested in engaging with this prove-a-negative nonsense. In my humble opinion, invading a neighbor and annexing part of it can't be justified short of a clear, present, and profound security risk. NATO, a voluntary, chronically underfunded defensive organization almost completely subservient to the political gyrations of the US, the leader of which is now actively trying to destroy it, is not that risk, and I don't believe that anybody honestly thinks it is.

Putin will gladly use any action on the part of European countries to justify more invasions. Like the way Sergey Lavrov threatened "military technical measures" in the Baltic region if Sweden joined NATO. Remember that? The Baltic states are lined up like dominos, possibly Belarus as well, where I've heard rumors that Russia is already sending troops. As Trump says when he has no clue what he's talking about, "We'll see what happens".

Soviet Union and Russia have always been incredibly paranoid about the vulnerability of the populated interior.

I believe NATO has the capability to bomb Moscow from Latvia in minutes.

I don't think Russia rates its vulnerability by border ratio vs total NATO aligned country border ratio. They look at how fast NATO could wreck Moscow.

Nope.

Saudis chopped WSJ journalist Hashoggi into parts! literally!

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_terrorism#Saud...

Yes, and I believe sanctions would be an appropriate response for that atrocity, as they should be for any state-sponsored murders of journalists or opposition politicians.

Good thing SA did not invade Yemen, had nothing to do with Khashoggi "suffering a paper cut" and absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 neither

You're missing the point.

Yes, thanks, we know. The Saudi Arabian regime is shamelessly and violently fascist, and corrupt at every level. What the fuck does that have to do with Russia's invasion of Ukraine and theft of the Crimean peninsula, and the commensurate response by the international community?

You stated:

> If Saudi Arabia were to commit a comparable offense, I assure you they'd face a comparable response

Offenses were cited to you. Where is the "commensurate response by the international community" to these offenses?

Read my comment again. I said that if SA were to do what Russia did -- invade a peaceful neighbor with no provocation and steal a portion of their country -- then I'm confident that sanctions would be levied against them. Pretty simple proposition, really.

So you don't think the Yemen situation is worse than Crimea (which is a complicated issue in itself?). Or even SA financing the expansion of Wahhabism?

I think SA gets too little sanctions for what they do. Too little.

And by the way, I'm totally in favour of Russia sanctions. I'm not questioning any of that.

I agree. SA is a hugely destructive influence across the Middle East in lot of ways. For whatever reason, the strategic interests of SA and the US align just enough to keep them out of trouble. But if SA were to emulate Putin's foreign policy and annex, say, Kuwait, I promise their luck would run out fast. Funny, I seems to remember something sort of similar happening not too long ago...

What's complicated about Crimea?

Crimea is historically(last 250 years) Russian territory with Russian population which always leaned towards Russia.

During reclaim there were not any resistance from the local population. It says a lot.

Crimea was Ukrainian for last 20 years and before that it was Soviet for 70 years.

And you're wrong about resistance as well.

Aren’t most of the sanctions related to the annexation of Crimea? Also, SA is an ally who allows a significant US military presence on its soil, in an area of strategic importance to global energy supply. Russia on the other hand still maintains an adversarial posture toward much of the Western world.

Yes, you can spawn freakazoo outfits who ram airplanes into skyscrapers, for as long as you have a US airbase.

I had a shock beyond believe seeing Bush pretty much saying "let Saudis go!," and jumping out of his skin trying to shield them, and then starting a war on Saddam — SA's biggest enemy at the time.

But lets keep the conversation on topic.

Really? From which point of view? Arguably true for the Yemenites, but the fact is, no one really care about the Yemenites (sorry if there are Yemenites reading that but it's a fact). Saudi Arabia doesn't try to interfere with any western European country, neither militarily nor in their politics...

> Saudi Arabia doesn't try to interfere with any western European country, neither militarily nor in their politics...

O_O you are so wrong, it is one the biggest foreign lobbying power in America, and Europe.

But this is not the point of this conversation.

Given that Russia has used a nerve agent near where I live I'll give the media a pass on demonising Russia.

I don't know what happened there but the official version leaves some serious doubts open. For example there was a long time talk of a "nurse" that found them. Only by accident it was revealed that this nurse was the head-nurse of the UK forces, i.e. in the rank of a general, well versed in chemical warfare. Also why was never the full tracks of the two Russians the victims revealed? There is CCTV on every corner in the UK. The story of the Russians was bogus but so is the official story. It wouldn't be the first time the gov stretches the truth. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

Edit: downvoting because it doesn't fit your world view? At least have the balls to reply.

The official story would always be vague. This is spook territory not regular police. A Scotland Yard team went to interview Litvinenko's assassins (One of whom was being treated for radiation poisoning - fancy that!), and they were completely outgunned by the FSB.

Also, as to CCTV, it is extremely prevalent in London but not as omniscient in places like Salisbury.

Security services sit on information like this for years, possibly never to reach daylight i.e. it's at best 50/50 whether MI5's director(Hollis) in the 50s and 60s was a double agent for the GRU, but we will never know what is in the archives. It is undeniable, however, that the Russian's did it - a Russian nerve agent just happens to turn up in the middle of Salisbury!?

> A Scotland Yard team went to interview Litvinenko's assassins (One of whom was being treated for radiation poisoning - fancy that!), and they were completely outgunned by the FSB.

Source?

From a BBC documentary into the investigation at the time. One of the members of the scotland yard team suggested they were poisoned by the russians (Laxatives in the water or similar not Po)

Do you have more information or some good sources on the MI5 director? That seems like a fascinating read.

Read Spycatcher by Peter Wright, incredibly interesting story of a working class MI5 scientific intelligence officer (engineer) turned literal spycatcher - largely spending his time chasing the work of naive upperclass communists of years gone by.

During Hollis's tenure, the KGB and GRU were just one step ahead every single move they made, to the point that they broke up a spy ring and the KGB didn't even phone home to Moscow that day. Other examples include bugged rooms suddenly being vacated or bugs in walls being filled with needle-like precision. They gradually worked up the tree until they realized there had to be a mole very high up in MI5 (or not at all, but it's not as neat).

British intelligence had been completely rocked by the Cambridge Five - communists had infiltrated pretty much everywhere in British intelligence until people like Peter Wright modernized the service largely by running around chasing leads from 40 years ago (in the 1970s) from people like Anthony Blunt who had given up fighting. The British establishment had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards the notion that an Englishman could be a communist despite his upbringing and public school training.

Can you imagine the fuss then, when it turns out that Hollis - who is already a very conservative (unambitious, won't step on toes etc.) leader of the service - is suspected of treachery? He had spent years in China in his youth, possibly having contact with known Russian assets. If he was really a spy, the smoking gun is that it turned out that when he was sent to interview Igor Gouzenko (A defector now residing in Canada), he apparently showed almost no interest in what Gouzenko had to say and was wearing a disguise. This may sound relatively innocuous but remember that a defector could quite possibly recognize you on from photographs of their agents.

The main case against this hypothesis relies on a few fairly not overly strong but nonetheless useful points: Oleg Gordievsky (Briefly Deputy Head of the KGB in London) clearly stated that his station chief stated that this rumour around Hollis must've been some British trick. This is potentially very strong evidence, however, it is the word of one man. Gordievsky is reliable, however, but more importantly he was KGB and Hollis was always supposed to be GRU (and he was definitely inactive long before Gordievsky would've been able to speak English let alone stationed in London). ELLI is a currently unknown cryptonym (alleged to be Hollis), it may apparently be Leo Long but that doesn't add up with the leaks from MI5.

MI5 (via Andrew) and MI6 (via Macintyre's book) - both had official archive access, extremely rare for MI6 - both claim its smoke without fire, Misguided conspiracy. It could well be, but this glosses over that there was a (according to Wright at least) an investigation that lasted the best part of a decade neither indicted nor exonerated him (https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104603) but on balance said it was more likely that not that he was not a spy. However, the proceedings of said investigation are not public as far as I can and the investigation-investigation thatcher speaks of in the speech linked to was run by a friend of Hollis. Chapman Pincher seems to allege that Hollis's family spoke openly of his work for the USSR but Pincher is now dead, and I don't really believe him at face value.

https://www.iwp.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/20150417_Repo... This document lays out pretty much everything known about Hollis, along with some (IIRC) elsewhere uncommon information linking Hollis's movements with that of the spy SONIA.

The real story here isn't really whether Hollis was a spy or not (he was incompetent as far as I can see), but that the Russian's are unbelievably good at espionage (but not unbeatable - see Operation PIMLICO).

The fact that it was invented in Russia doesn't mean that this sample was Russian made. Every decent chemist can produce that stuff. We were also shown powerpoint slides of Saddams truck-mounted labs of WMD - they just didn't exist. The second mission was to "win hearts and minds". Result: 1,000,000 people dead. Women, old people, children and toddlers included. Just watch collateral damage again. Do it 100,000 times and you know what happened in Iraq. Plus a dash of abuse and torture of prisoners of war in the Abu Ghraib prison. There are plenty of things I doubt when I hear about them.

>Every decent chemist can produce that stuff.

After reading, "Novichok agents: a historical, current, and toxicological perspective"[1] it looks like the only places to have produced such agents are Russian chemical weapon labs and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons Central Analytical Database.

Maybe someone who works in the field can provide some more evidence either way?

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6039123/#R19

Iranians were the first to publish about the synthesis:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/rcm.7757

https://analyticalscience.wiley.com/do/10.1002/sepspec.1591c...

I am pretty sure that the Porton Down military research facility next to Salisbury is capable or producing it too - but that doesn't mean they produced the specific poison used to attack the Skipals.

The same for VX gas that was used to kill Kim Jong Un's brother in Malaysia. VX was indeed invented by the brits but I would seriously doubt that they killed Kim Jong-Nam.

Edit: this is just factual information. What kind of fscking loosers do downvote this? Go get a reality check.

You're right - any well-equipped state could have synthesized the nerve agent used on the Skripals. But that's not the only evidence: two suspects were identified, who traveled from Russia and stayed at a local hotel. The nerve agent was found in their hotel room.

Of course, you could argue that British intelligence framed those Russians during the investigation, and poisoned the Skripals themselves as some sort of ruse for expelling diplomats. But if you deny the evidence and proceed down that path, you've made the decision not to alter your beliefs and no discussion will change your mind.

seems to be a lot more downvoting recently. getting to where my eyes are drawn to those comments first, which is funny. blow a raspberry at them.

>Also why was never the full tracks of the two Russians the victims revealed?

They are revealed here pretty well: https://web.archive.org/web/20180927051828/http://news.met.p...

As someone who was born and grew up under Russian occupation I can assure you everyone on the inside of Iron Curtain was aware how bad it was even back then.

As someone speaking for everyone you sound stupid.

Woah... it's almost as if Russia has been the target of western propaganda ever since the establishment of the Soviet Union.

What's up with that?

You are wrong. The Russia has been a target of the western propaganda ever since the Great Schism[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism

I was skeptical that Russia was even influenced much by the Eastern Orthodox Church before the Great Schism, but I looked it up and found that it was: before the Great Schism, the Rus tried to invade Byzantium, which increased trade and cultural exchanges, and an important Rus ruler, Vladimir, converted to Orthodox Christianity.

Yeah, attacking all their neighbors, conspiring against rest of them, sending assassins across the globe... What's wrong with that, eh?

Stop trying to change the subject. This is a discussion about Russia, not the USA.

Whataboutism as usual?

It depends on how you define "outsiders". Look at the 2019 poll table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Russian_sentiment#Statist...

The Five Eyes countries, Germany, Poland, and Japan have overwhelmingly negative views (easy to explain for historical reasons).

But you see overwhelmingly positive views of Russia in China, India, Nigeria, Mexico and Indonesia; and ambivalent views elsewhere in Asia, Latin America, and the Mediterranean.

I think lumping everyone together is the least biased group of outsiders.

“It found that Russia was the least popular G-8 country globally. ... Overall, the percentage of respondents with a positive view of Russia was only 31%.“

That supports the wider point quite well. Though Russia has very positive relations with a small number of countries. For example providing China with massive aid in living memory.

As a Russian, I have definitely felt a change in attitude towards Russia fairly recently (since Crimea probably). Overall feelings switched more towards fear, distrust and annoyance that Russia is punching above its weight (wanting to be a Great Power while having a relatively puny economy). Recent case in point that comes to mind: one of the characters in the show Devs is Russian. Spoiler alert, he is definitely not a good guy.

A surprising consequence of this trend is that while annoying, it had definitely led me to appreciate my home country more (even if I don't support the current government). Probably a predictable manifestation of in-group/out-group dynamics.

I agree and think that view of Russia is unfair to be honest. I’m Irish and the Irish have a relatively similar history (we had feudalism and colonialism and Russia had feudalism and communism - neither is democracy or “freedom”). Russia, and the Russian people, have done fantastic things in literature and science, and their history is amazing. I met a Russian girl recently and she called me her enemy. I was a little confused, but then she said I was British (I ain’t!) and the British are the enemy of Russia. She was very clear on this, it is how she viewed the world, or at least how she saw the dynamics of global powers. I had a great chat with her and we had great fun, I think, though, I was still her enemy at the end of the night. I think the same can be said of the “West’s” view of Russians, maybe not the enemy but certainly shady. It’s not helped by Putin and the poisonings but the ordinary Russian people are not really represented by him or by his actions.

As an aside, when I mentioned Putin, she called herself, mockingly, a daughter of Putin. Then she said, we had no playgrounds before he was in power, now we have playgrounds. It was a flippant remark, but a telling one all the same. The west neglected the Russians when the Soviet Union broke up. Bush/Regan celebrated a Cold War victory, which was a mistake. They should have embraced Russia and recognised the potential of the Russian people. I think the Russians have never got over being treated like this, which, obviously, has echos of the Germans in the 30s.

Sorry if I went on here, I think it’s an important subject.

Thanks for the kind words. I think you are onto something - the sentiment you describe runs deep, especially among older people. It is of course generously fueled by state propaganda with "see how they treated us" being one of the favorite talking points. So distrust grows from both sides.

Russia seems fairly unique in it's disinformation campaigns trying to stir trouble pretty much everywhere around the world. I'm not quite sure what their problem is but it's not very endearing.

I'm not sure how true this is. Rural Americans young enough to not remember the cold war are pretty well aware that they (arguably) have more in common with the Russian people than they do with any western European people even if the geopolitical goals of Russia are in conflict of those of the US.

Please elaborate..

this is the top comment? you people can't even hold your own standards

This comment would be considered bigoted by some or at least when applied to some other nations. But I agree with you. I came from there about when communism crashed and had high hopes, which have now been destroyed. Russians just don't have the same wishes that people in the west do. They just want a grand and powerful nation that is feared by others. They don't mind living rather poor as long as they have nukes and hypersonic missiles or some such. And that leads to a place that doesn't seem very nice, friendly, or attractive.

This is especially interesting to me -- that the collective mentality of a people, first of all, is a real thing. And that it can really influence how the country itself evolves. And whether it can feed back on itself in bad ways and produce cycle of people and government and culture that lock a country into a bad situation...

> that the collective mentality of a people, first of all, is a real thing

I don't think that's true, or at least well-defined?

Well, the Russian leadership perhaps. I wouldn't mind betting that many ordinary Russian people would rather be a normal EU style democracy like France or Germany.

Many do, but surprisingly many more don't. Their main complaints are economic. If they would be a bit wealthier, they would be content. They are ok with a one party state, homophobia, corruption, etc. It's just they're very poor and it does kind of suck. So they're upset about wealth, but everything else is ok as far as they're concerned. Generalizing of course.

might have something to do with the constant anti-russia propaganda in the west

He was poisoned, and survived thrice, and was also jailed for really insubstantial periods of time.

I think the Kremlin is very much content with having such a plaything opposition, which tacitly plays along, and does nothing to really challenge it.

The few other people who ever were a credible threat to the regime in Russia were dealt with much more unceremoniously: gunned down in the broad daylight.

I think the KGB is just "trolling" him.

Would they were they serious, they could've thrown the usual "espionage," or "terrorism" charge, and landed him in prison for 20+ years, poison him to death properly, or simply shot him dead as they've done with hundreds of others.

Don't forget the "fell out a window" accident that has happened to several Russian doctors recently.

Yes, people "fall out of windows" for much lesser offenses to the regime in Russia.

Given this, take any speculation of suddenly appearing "credible opposition" in Russia with a big, big grain of salt.

I think this is what the parent comment is referring to.

https://www.vox.com/2020/5/6/21248553/coronavirus-russia-doc...

High status people have ground floor offices and fix their own beverages.

And to Scot Young: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scot_Young#Death

https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/from-russia-with-blood-1...

To be fair it was a complicated time for doctors, suicide after being burned at work for a extremely stressing pandemy time was not ruled out. Newspapers will choose the most outrageous possibility, but nobody seems to be analyzing the possibility that (some of) those were a real suicide.

He was poisoned once in jail before, and someone threw brilliant green at him, damaging his eye.

So, technically, he was poisoned twice, not trice.

As if this mattered. Sigh.

I had no idea what brilliant green was (a dye also used as an antiseptic). It seems to be used often in a 'Zelyonka attack'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelyonka_attack

Not all are dealt with "unceremoniously." See Alexander Litvinenko[0], who was not only poisoned but in such a way that there was no plausible deniability for FSB. More than anything they appeared to be making a spectacle of their impunity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...

Also Sergei Skripal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Skripal

Using WMD to take out a single person does indeed seem like making a political statement.

And if the choice of murder weapon didn't make it glaringly obvious enough, Putin has all but publicly admitted to these, as well:

>"Traitors will kick the bucket, believe me. Those other folks betrayed their friends, their brother in arms." [0]

>"Whatever they got in exchange for it, those 30 pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them.” [0]

>"Treason is the gravest crime possible and traitors must be punished. I am not saying the Salisbury incident is the way to do it, but traitors must be punished." [1]

They cloak themselves with plausible deniability in many cases, but for turncoat intelligence personnel, they seem pretty explicit: at some point, no matter where you are, you will die an untimely, slow, painful death. It's definitely an attempted deterrent.

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/vladimir-put...

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vladimir-puti...

It's a rather confusing statement though since Skripal survived this WMD attack.

OK perhaps that should have been "attempt to take out" but I don't think you use nerve gas for anything other than trying to kill people?

The culture of the Soviet and Russian intelligence agencies is to severely and publicly punish traitors.

It’s like he’s the modern day Rasputin.

I think you’re right, if they really wanted to get him, they would. There aren’t bay of pigs amateurs.

This. I strongly recommend a book called “Nothing is true and everything is possible”. It describes how State media operates in Russia (and you could make a point many other countries have learned a thing or two from the book).

Basically there needs to be an opposition, in order to be a triumphant democracy. But you need to keep it weak and under control. Seeing an opposition gives hope to people. Then they loose elections, and hope deflates. Do this a few times over and you have the country under your control for the long run...

I've read that book, and it's very entertaining.

But the actions described in that book include setting up political parties to co-opt various movements do not describe what Alexey Navalny was doing. Navalny is the exception to what was the norm in Russia: an actual opposition, albeit a very weak one.

Which begs the question, why is he still alive and un-jailed?

I like to think of myself as pretty level-headed and totally unbelieving of conspiracy theory. As an example, I think "billionaire in a prison cell kills himself to avoid the consequences of his actions" is a far more likely story than "covert assassins enter a high-security prison and stage a fake suicide".

But the moment the coronavirus started to get really bad, the first place my mind went was: "How does this help Putin?"

That's not to say I actually continued down that train of thought -- I don't think it's very likely Putin kept a secret lab that evolved a very potent virus and waited to release it at a time that would cause the most instability with his biggest enemies. But... my mind did go there, very fast. And sometimes it does revisit that place.

That's crazy to think about, but you definitely may be right. I suppose that is a very Chekist way of trolling.

Although I certainly think it's very likely some aspect of the government is involved, what are the odds that some of these instances have just been the actions of diehard Putin supporters who acted totally alone? I know full well Putin's and his security services' despotic and cruel nature, but I also do want to know (to some degree of confidence) when they are or aren't involved with something.

No, do not entertain yourself with such thought.

The fact of:

1. Sings of long term preparation, and surveillance were there.

2. His hospital room is now "guarded" by KGB agents out of Moscow who appeared out of nowhere within a few hours. That's pretty much a very deliberately displayed smoking gun.

Thanks, figures. I have little doubt Putin ordered it (tacitly or explicitly). There just seem to be so many (attempted or successful) murders that I imagine there must have been one or two times where he's been like "fuck, I didn't even do this one but I still have to go on a PR denial tour over it". I'm pretty sure he did do the overwhelming majority, though.

> I suppose that is a very Chekist way of trolling.

are you an alt of John Schindler?

I think there's a chance I started using that term when I read some thing written him or another commentator years ago, which caused me to research the history of the organization.

This [1] is a good article from Buzzfeed about all the UK hits that have happened. Not all were poisonings.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/from-russia-with-blood-1...

Given what's happening in Belarus, this seems like odd timing to take this action (assuming he was intentionally poisoned by the government).

Couldn't it be causal, as the article suggests?

In Russia unified voting day is September 13. Navalny is running "Smart Voting" campaign to consolidate votes for most electable candidate. Taking him off the chess desk is a serious dent in that campaign.

At the same time, using poison gives Putin maximum plausible deniability. It is almost impossible to prove his involvement.

I was born in Russia and I despise Putin. He is the reason why I emigrated. He and his cronies brough the country into the dark age, from which it may never come out. He is, without a single doubt, Hitler of the 21st century.

* He consolidated all the political and judicial power. Destroyed, physically, politically or judicially all the opponents. Elections are completely fake.

* He completely controls all secret services, with vast spying network and formidable IT intrusion capabilities.

* He implemented full and completely legal surveilance state. Documented and legally mandated recording of all the cellphone communications, email, internet access logs. They urgently started building DNA database of all the citizens. Every citizen will be assigned a unique number to which all the data from all the agencies will be tied. Even a regular neighborhood policeman will have access to all this data. Cameras with face recognition being installed all over Moscow. Chinese-like internet firewall is being created.

* He controls the organized crime networks, in fact his whole gang who is in charge of Russia grew out of that crime syndicate.

* He leads and benefits from a group of very powerful "capitalists", serving the regime needs in many, many different ways around the world and internally.

* He completely controls all the media (bought out by his cronies or nationalized), which helped him create a blatant propaganda machine, rivaled probably only by Chinese and North Koreans. They can spin anything. People in Russia are utterly confused and don't believe in reality anymore. They are drowned in ridiculous bullshit all day long and conspiracy theories are being distributed by state TV channels.

* He usied this propaganda machine to create myth of the great Russian world and moral and intellectual exceptionality of Slavs. Constantly bringing up the great heroic ancestors and their achievement in WW2, and duty if modern Russians to not squander what they achieved. There's constantly talks about how Russia is the only true God's country, and that it's a moral savior of the world. There's an instilled feeling of victimhood, almost sainthood, of Russian culture. Everything that happens is somebody else's fault, a foreign influence, an accident, or sabotage. They truly believe that russians are the greatest people on Earth.

* He annexed Crimea, created instability and puppet regimes in many bordering states. His next possible goal is Belarus.

I believe, these are pretty much all the ingredients necessary to build a nazi/fascist state, and that is in fact exactly what they've built.

That reads like the playbook being used by certain leader we have here in the states.

Who ?

I don’t see any huge, monolithic nations not moving toward this goal.

Putin seems to be quite good at it, but that doesn’t discount the effects in countries he doesn’t run. The global superpowers all dream of having a system like that, and all are various steps toward achieving it.

Here’s the same text, region modified:

> There's constantly talks about how America is the only true God's country, and that it's a moral savior of the world. There's an instilled feeling of victimhood, almost sainthood, of the American way of life. Everything that happens is somebody else's fault, a foreign influence, an accident, or sabotage. They truly believe that americans are the greatest people on Earth.

Sound familiar?

> [Putin] consolidated all the political and judicial power. Destroyed, physically, politically or judicially all the opponents.

You are writing in English, and thus aimed at a US/UK audience - the president of the US (Clinton) and PM of the UK (Major) celebrated the 1993 shelling by the military of the Russian parliament that consolidated Yeltsin's power, and that of his chosen successor, Putin. Putin didn't consolidate power and destroy opposition, this was done in 1993 to celebration in the West.

The problem with this in the West really started in 2007 when Putin announced in Munich that Russia would no longer tolerate the US's continual encroachment against Russia. Suddenly all these events going back to 1993 which had been celebrated were cast as nefarious.

Yeltsin certainly began the process, but it's hard to argue that Putin hasn't acted very aggressively to consolidate power. The idea that just because it was a process that started under a previous ruler, the currently ruler shouldn't be blamed for embracing and expanding the corrupt policies makes no sense.

Also, what is the encroachment you are talking about against Russia? Are you talking about allowing the people of the former Soviet Union to choose to move away from Russia toward the West and enter into a defensive military alliance? Because that's not encroachment. That's helping those people get out from under Russian encroachment. Russia does not get to play the victim card because we're letting people outside of Russia choose to move away from them. That's not how reality works. Just because Russia neighbors the Baltics, Georgia, and Ukraine does not give them any right to demand they follow specific domestic policies. But that is exactly what Putin is trying to assert.

Just remember what happened when Cuba followed some domestic policies US didn't like in 1962.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a domestic policy?

Technically, yes. A sovereign country can invite another sovereign country to host their missiles, especially if they have a powerful enemy nearby, ready to launch theirs.

> placing foreign nuclear missiles in your country to threaten another country

Clearly that's not "domestic".

Threaten another country? That's only one interpretation. I would say, to protect own soil.

lol - just noticed your stealth edit. I was quoting you.

First, let's not play whataboutism. Certainly the US isn't perfect. That doesn't make what Russia is doing ok. Second, Cuba is a totalitarian dictatorship. That's probably not the best example.

Yes, this is indeed the "encroachment" GP talks about. The Russocentric worldview does not see non-Russian easterners as sentient beings capable of making choices, they are little more than mooks and serfs which rightfully belong to them. A Czech or a Georgian cannot decide to join NATO or the EU, it is "The West" stealing Russia's stuff.

This is perfectly fine view if you're Russian (who wouldn't want to control giant serf armies?), but it's pretty depressing to see it take off the western discourse.

The reason for that, of course, is that Russia, like any right-thinking country, wants to be surrounded by friendly or neutral buffer states.

If Mexico and Canada entered a military alliance with China, how do you think Washington would react? How long would it take until we would see regime change in Ottawa?

It's not a 'perfectly fine' view, it is just a natural consequence of being encircled.

> Constantly bringing up the great heroic ancestors and their achievement in WW2, and duty if modern Russians to not squander what they achieved.

I would also add the death cult mentality that they are trying to achieve with the Russians ("we can do this again anytime!").

> Everything that happens is somebody else's fault, a foreign influence, an accident, or sabotage.

This really sounds like many US politicans and public media figures.

I strongly believe Putin held back Russia in the past two decades. Brain drain is real and Russia had all the right pieces to be a force in tech.

Russia definitely has the talent.

Had

Name any political, cultural, economic, literature, sports achievement in last 30 years to come out of Russia. That's right Internet trolls which are an evolution on kgbs psyops

nginx?

And IntelliJ IDEA of course, which I think many HN visitors are using in one form or another. This still doesn't change the original point that Putin regime has been very damaging to Russia.

It's true that Jetbrains has lots of developers in Russia, but Jetbrains s.r.o is Czech and was founded in Prague under the name Intellij Software.

JetBrains has this name this because they were brains jetting from Russia. All founders were Russians, of course.

Please.

jetbrains is a russian company with russian owners. The very fact they (similarly to wargaming of belarus) etablished venues in czech, cyprus etc, were:

1. to whitewash 'russia' label from they brand

2. to avoid potential economic sanctions (esp. post 2014 and Crimea)

3. tax evasion (yeah, cyprus is hq, truly like egshell apple/google ireleand is not for tax evasion)

4. able to recruit some westerners which were needed for sales/marketing to out-of-russia markets (skills, local market, local connections).

to make it clear: I consider both products really good, and both companies successfull and well managed on a worldwide scale. They success can be also measured by the very fact that you fell prey to their marketing strategy 'we're not russian company'. they are.

Was it more or less damaging then the tire-pyre disaster that the country went through in the 90s, prior to him taking power?

That's when my family left, and while my remaining relatives have soured against Putin in recent years (Funny how that happened... They were all for him, right up until ~2017, or so), nobody feels nostalgic for the 90s.

Let's not whitewash history. The Russian public has only recently started souring on him. The brain drain didn't start because of him - it started 28 years ago, as soon as the borders were opened.

And the drain stopped because he worked hard to eliminate poverty and bring stable relations with the rest of the world? Nope.

So brain drain became even more of a problem under his rule.

Kotlin[1] programming language?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotlin_(programming_language)

Sure, and Nginx as well. JetBrains are in Eastern Europe, Nginx is sold to West, wonder why?

Or you can list graphene - a really nice, to say mildly, achievement. Guess why it wasn't announced from Russia but from UK?

Russia is being seriously held back by the autocracy. The whole world suffers to a degree, which explains animosity... Of course Russia suffers the most, but such things are hard to change. Ukraine and Belarus going the long and troublesome road now, while we here keep disagreements about good and evil.

Russians have won 3 Nobel prizes in Physics since 2000. I think that's a cultural/economic achievement

We're those Russians working in Russia?

"KGB psyops"

Wish people would stop trying to play pretend RU experts.

If you want details on actual cough "Psyops", one can read a book like Active Measures by Thomas Rid.

Try reverse engineering or data recovery sometime.

> Name any political, cultural, economic, literature, sports achievement in last 30 years to come out of Russia.

Russia remains prominent in the literary world. Contemporary authors like Sorokin and Ulitskaya are widely translated into other languages. If anything Russia's decline in those other respects makes its authors more competitive internationally, because "Novelist X captures the gritty reality of an oppressive state" has been since the Soviet era a dependable angle to market books to foreign readers.

Oh, by the way, I remember reading this really interesting narrative of how the Litvinenko polonium poisoning went down and some of the backstory. It's by a Guardian news reporter who tried to investigate.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002581721770737...

I believe you can grab it off of Sci-hub in case you can't access the above for free...

I don't have a lot of knowledge in history or politics of foreign countries, so perhaps someone here could answer this question:

In the end, time kills us all. Putin is currently 67 years old, I assume he will likely rule for another decade plus before time comes for him. Any hypothesis as to what may happen after Putin? Is it likely he'll "name" a successor who shares his authoritarian views and the cycle continues?

For those interested in trying to understand more of the context of modern day Russia, and more particularly, Putin's rise to power, I highly recommend 3 books.

1) Catherine Belton: Putin's People https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VMZYK13/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

2) Bill Browder: Red Notice https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O30HFT2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

3) Masha Gessen: Several books, but I particularly liked Man without a Face https://www.amazon.com/Masha-Gessen/e/B001H6MBXK

I really enjoyed parts of Man Without a Face, especially the details on his early life and how/why he was chosen by Yeltsin.

Get political news off HN. It's a slippery slope.

It always devolves into rants with tenuous connections to the current president. They can't help themselves.

Is there a book written by a soldier that explains why people defend/enforce the power of evil people?

Putin himself is not poisoning these people, someone is doing it for him. Why?

Doesn't have to be from Russia. Any soldier defending any evil person - why?

Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?

reference: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/opinion/meddlesome-priest...

Nb: I was referencing Becket, not Comey lol

Money? I'm sure the people needed to keep that whole show going are getting paid quite well.

It's usually extensive training and ideology. It makes money an irrelevant or a secondary goal.

Here's a YouTube video that summarizes the Dictator's Handbook. It gives an explanation about how the perspective of a dictator/autocrat is different than than someone who is in charge of a democratic organization. Basically, the fewer people you have to answer to, the more you need to reward those few followers by stealing from everyone else. This forms a pyramid scheme where everyone is trying to take as much as they can so they can then redistribute the spoils to their key supporters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

I can't point you to a book written by a soldier, but you might be able to find some conclusions by reading "The Authoritarians" by Bob Altemeyer[0], which studies, as you say, why people defend/enforce the power of evil people.

[0] https://www.theauthoritarians.org/options-for-getting-the-bo...

I'm either guilty of having this mindset myself and unaware of it, or I'm unable to empathise with this mindset. But this link is approximately what I was looking for. Thank you.

I would like to find an introspective writer who is also an authoritarian.

This Atlantic article [0] goes in to that subject a bit. It is less focused on "why do people defend/enforce the power of evil people?" and more on comparing people who collaborate vs those who do not. But still a good read.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-...

Well, this question is similar to foreigners cannot understand how any Americans can support racist/sexist/amoral Trump. For Putin’s supporters , his is the only person who can make Russia great

Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men is about a specific unit of German special police used to round up and massacre Jews. It's been 15+ years since I read it, but I think the conclusion was these otherwise ordinary men (not ardent Nazis) followed orders because of a mix of peer-pressure and obedience to authority.

It's probably as simple as that.

I'll read that, thank you.

People like Putin and Trump play dirty because they think that's what you have to do to win

To win what? Lets not forget what the stakes are, the countries where all these narcissistic psychopaths were either elected or self imposed dictators for life were held back. Who wants a president who considers winning a personal gain? It is extremely harmful for the short and long term as well.

A president has to inspire unity for the country and most dictators suppress and hide the fact that they don’t even have half the country supporting them using different tactics from rigging elections to squashing the opposition.

Sure, but supporters don't mind as long as they get some rewards. This can be as simple as feelings of higher status than their opponents or some out group. Even if supporters themselves are objectively worse off, as long as someone else has it worse again, then they feel like winners.

I think it's possibly actually different motivations. Trump wants to be re-elected because he's an egomaniac. Putin wants to be re-elected because his _best_ case for political retirement is being prosecuted.

And what makes you think Navalny plays any other way?

It doesn't matter why they play dirty. The question is how they get away with it. What are the motivations of the people who back them up and enable them? Someone like Trump would fade away as a kind of comical narcissistic egomaniac sideshow (which he was before 2016) if it wasn't for the fact that there are powerful people benefiting from him being in the Whitehouse. That combined with identifying real grievances among working class people, which the so-called "left" in the US promises but fails to remedy ... it's a recipe for disaster.

Hitler rose to power from the virulent fear of communism combined with the chaos and ineptness of the Weimar republic. Trump has risen to power because of the latent racism in the United States combined with the incompetence of the two political parties in the US and the fallout from the 2008 crisis. Among other things.

Playing dirty only happens when there's nobody there to stop you. This we all know from the elementary school playground.

Note the very different tone here between this discussion about russia and previous discussions about china. Strangely calmer and less troll-swamped, this.

Probably because you're not commenting as much on this thread.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com