I expect the same is true in much of the rest of the world too. But as a European, I can say the sentiment is widespread here.
How about that western word?
None of those "putin journo killings" has never been proven to have any links to Putin. All these anti-Russian accusations are moral equivalents of people claiming that US government killed Michael Hastings.
So please - STFU.
When the Russian government has someone killed, they don't die in a mysterious accident. They're gunned down, when they're lucky. When they're not, they die an agonizing death after being subtly and fatally poisoned by radioactive isotopes.
There's a big difference between countries in Europe and their views on the world. I'm pretty convinced countries more envelopped in realpolitik will have people less convinced of your equivalence.
Not trying to defend Russian govt (which is without a doubt pretty sinister), but this 'journalist murdering' thing that pops up every time Westerners discuss Russian internal policy is a bit off the mark. The way you say it cues that all Russian media is pro-government and Russian citizens en masse are either brainwashed drones or impregnable oppositional free-thinkers. While in fact its only TV which is thoroughly controlled by the government. Russian press is pretty vocal and most of it is clearly critical of the United Russia party policy. More so Russian online press — I don't know a single popular online news outlet which isn't critical of United Russia (modestly or very much so). Sure there are a couple of high profile murder cases that may be linked to Russian govt, but list of murdered journalists found in wiki is in its entirety composed either of people died in 90s or people whose death may (or may not) be connected with provincial level oligarchs, especially on North Caucasus. So saying that murdering journalists is what Russian govt does is just not true. It is true that govt doesn't provide them with utmost security though.
Why do I even care? Because you guys could be more critical of real and serious United Russia's wrongdoings (like prosecution of a row of activists involved in protests of 2011-2), instead of reiterating on secondary matters like journalist murders (ostensibly committed by government) or gay rights.
I hope I will not have to change accounts after this post.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_R...
Tell me that anything remotely like this has happened in the US or Western Europe.
Reading that list, it almost feels like murdering a Russian journalist is what one does instead of sending an angry letter to the editor.
Sure, it looks like government isn't providing them (and everyone else, for that matter) with enough security, but it's nothing like saying it deliberately murders them. The most hard evidence for me is that Russian press itself doesn't put much emphasis on it.
About Politkovskaya and Litvinenko:
The version about Politkovskaya murder I find the most plausible is that her murder is linked with Putin's ally and appointed president of Chechnya Kadyrov. Before her death she was working on human rights violations in Chechnya, including torture. In fact, you can still find her last interview about it on Novaya Gazeta (newspaper she worked for) website, dated 9th October of 2006. What Russian government did here is covering Kadyrov and finding scapegoats who are supposed to represent Chechen 'terrorists' (opposed to Kadyrov and Russian govt). Torture committed by federal and local pro-Russian forces is still a reality in North Caucasus, just about a year ago there was a story on it in 170 thousands readers strong Russian Reporter Magazine. Western press didn't seem to give due attention to the cause Politkovskaya died for, instead preferring, as usual, to focus on apparently more important issues such as gay people forbidden to proclaim their sexuality in public. At least no one has died over that story yet.
Litvinenko case is a weird one. So he is some sort of whistleblower who apparently disclosed Putin's inside job and had to die due to Polonium poisoning. The story goes like this: Litvinenko has disclosed Putin's inside job (which most likely isn't an inside job, basically it's a Russian equivalent of 9/11-as-an-inside-job story), so FSB had to make him painfully die almost in a Sicilian mafia fashion. I am not a Western layman so I don't automatically deem crazy everyone who happened to be in power and at the same time to the East from certain meridian. I see why Sicilian mafia would kill somebody after the fact: it doesn't care much about publicity and it doesn't want to be betrayed once again. But I don't see why would Putin do that, he deeply cares about his perception in the West (as long as it doesn't meddle with his authoritative pretensions and support of his electorate) and he doesn't often blow up houses (if at all). Since the word already spread and you could buy a book in Putin-blows-up-houses genre in any Russian kiosk that sells cigarettes, yellow rags and pulp fiction, killing the man responsible for that in such a bizarre fashion (poisoning someone with radioactive materiel is in the same basket with feeding someone to their pet bear, between two shots of vodka, saying 'Na zdorovje, tovarishchi') is acknowledgement of guilt. Tldr if Putin did kill Litvinenko, it was the most stupid thing he did in his entire career.
Is there some cultural convention in the US that I don't understand whereby murdering (white) journalists is really really wrong and never possibly justifiable but murdering (arab) children is a perfectly acceptable part of the rough and tumble of geopolitics? Otherwise I don't understand your narrow focus on journalists.
As an aside, it's not like the US never deliberately targets journalists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera#Death_of_Tareq_Ayyo...
I've got no trouble making a distinction between killing someone because of a mistake or even because of negligence and killing someone deliberately because they are writing things that are inconvenient to you. Come to think of it, neither does the law; the law has made that distinction since the middle ages. It calls one of those "murder", and the other something else.
So, attributing their death to "Chechnya" is a little like attributing a hypothetical murder of Sy Hersh to the Iraqis.
Shorter: no, I think you're wrong about this.
The law doesn't have a specific term for people who just have a callous indifference to the lives of others, but people throughout human history have used a lot of terms to describe such people. Today I will use the term 'scum'.
Secondly, the collateral damage is not the goal of the drone strikes, in fact they use drones to reduce the amount of collateral damage(for reasons beyond precision munitions). If you run the numbers, the amount of collateral deaths are far lower than conventional airstrikes. The deaths of journalists is/was the explicit intent of the power structure in Russia because it furthers their political goals.
Second, terrorism is not an existential threat. In fact, there is a strong argument that the drone strikes actually increase the number of "terrorists" and make a successful strike against the US more likely, not less.
So the way I see it, Russia kills journalists who threaten the existing power structure, and the US kills more-or-less random people in order to bolster the existing power structure. Two, equally-disgusting, sides of the same coin.
http://rense.com/general36/camm.htm
US bombed al-Jazeera in Kabul
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2001/nov/17/warinafghanista...