Russians Keep Turning Up Dead All over the World

theres border control for a reason...if foreign hitmen can get into the country, kill someone, and get away with it, whats the point of border control?

"the West" is normally understood to be a certain collection of governments, people, ideas, and institutions. The police of Spain and Spanish intelligence would be included here. They should've made sure that the defected soldier could, if he wanted, remain totally anonymous.

'The West' is the collection of countries comprising "The Anglophone Five Eyes", Europe and Japan as an honorary addition.

What other name would you use for this bunch of people? "The West" has become the normal accepted term over the last few decades.

You say that it's a good thing but your examples suggest the contrary.

I think cases like that show that people aren't killing each other not because it's hard or enforcement and punishment prevents them. They don't do it mostly because they just don't want to. And if they want to, they want to kill people close to them which makes them easy to connect with the crime. Murderers who pick unrelated victims basically roam free. It's good that there's so few of them.

Right. When you're on the run, as he should have been:

Step One: You have to absolutely break all contact with your past. That's the first step. Family, friends, bank accounts, old email accounts, everything. (And, needless to say, if you're Russian and are trying to escape Russian agents, the last thing you do is hang out in Russian enclaves. So you break with your culture, as well, to the fullest extent possible.)

Step Two: You have to change your appearance; if you were clean-shaven and had long hair, you go bald and grow as much facial hair as you can comfortably manage; if possible you get some plastic surgery done; if you had tattoos, you remove them or discreetly cover them with new ink, no matter where they are.

Step Three: You go to a big city of 500k+ residents and work cash jobs-- dishwasher, line cook, nightclub bouncer, delivery driver, construction crew, etc. -- the possibilities are vast. If you're sitting on a cash reserve, don't work and try to make some money investing.

Step Four: No heavy drinking, and no drugs that might get you arrested and lead to a paper trail.

Do all that and you might live a normal lifespan. This playbook is how quite a lot of fugitives managed to get away with it, including, until quite recently and famously, this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kirishima

Because they’re often, not always trying to help the west / you ?

Because it’s the right thing to do?

When people are being assassinated in beach towns in Spain, society should do something. The people being assassinated, according to the article, are Russians who decided they don’t support Russia. “Running from the problems of their own country” is a time honored tradition of “The West”, according to every American elementary school curriculum explaining the founding of America.

The west claims to be enlightened lands of the free, so people who are part of the west, should be open to sharing that freedom with those who seek it, and protect them from those who seek to shut out freedom.

National pride? What kind of nation allows another nation to spectacularly violate the most fundamental of their laws, deep in the homeland, with laughing impunity?

Russians running away from problems in their country are assets to the west. One of the things that makes the west great is its respect for individual freedom. At some level Russians know this: just compare the numbers of Russians trying to move to the West, compared to the numbers of westerns moving to Russia. We're better, and their population knows it en mass. So from a selfish point of view, it's in our interest to live up to this image. If a Russian says: I refuse to take part in Russia's aggression towards the West, we definitely should treat them extra well.

Also consider that another thing that makes the West great is its respect for rule of law. People who are in the west should have the right to walk down the street without fear of being assassinated, regardless of who they are or where they come from; this is a western value that I prize very much. If you start allowing "I don't care if a person gets illegally killed in Spain because he's a bad guy anyway", you're eroding the power of the West.

And finally, the problem that the west needs to counter act aren't just individuals of specific nationalities: it's an aggressive state and its institutions that have as stated goal to weaken us.

Let me know if you have more questions. As long as they're in good faith I'm happy to continue discussing.

It's disappointing to see a brainless comment like that on HN. You don't need to be versed in geopolitics to understand that Russia is a threat to western Europe and people like this create a counterweight to the insane part of Russian society. You need dissidents and oppositionists to have a chance to build a normal country in Russia.

Embarrassing that the west failed to protect Gonzalo Lira from a similar fate in Ukraine.

It's more embarrassing to become like Russia than to not be able to stop them.

The people who respond that no big deal he ended up dead because he had Bad Views because he voiced propaganda from the other side are not disproving, but rather underscoring this point.

Tactically, sure, it has an effect. But it just reeks of strategic impotence, like targeting all those Ukrainian civilians. Can't take a city? Settle for destroying an apartment building instead.

It's basically another point to the idea that this whole conflict being about Putin reenacting his trauma of the USSR and its collapse. During the cold war, punishing defectors or spending some soldiers lives in slow burn conflicts wasn't a significant waste of resources and it did shore up the lines of national identity. But what were relatively successful tactics back then have now been scaled up despite being completely inapplicable for the current reality.