Russian assassins on foreign soil are also known to shot people during the day in broad daylight, just as [0] did in 2019 in Berlin Tiergarten park. Unfortunately, he was exchanged and is living freely after only a few years in german prison.
As for German citizens: a red cross employee, an immigration lawyer, a 'political scientist' and a tourist who apparently tried to smuggle six gummy bears coated with canabis oil into Russia:
International politics are fake. There is a gentleman's agreement that secret services can kill “traitors” and “enemies” anywhere as long as no one objects (or the objecting country is not important enough anyway). The hirelings get the fake documents that are perfectly known to the officials to be the token of non-diplomatic immunity, and also allow them to pretend they were once again fooled by the bad foreign state. In Skripal case, killers spent the day before waiting for some agents to appear at the location to tell them to go sightseeing somewhere else. Nothing happened = UK was OK with what they were doing. Only after the fact British officials started to create a scene, and what they were worried about most was the fact that Russian officials have sold the “special” passports to way too many “irrelevant” thugs and oligarchs who wanted to be untouchable when travelling abroad (hence the leak of the existence of those passports, and silent confirmation that they were respected by so-called free and lawful countries).
You need to understand that those “above” are dumb bureaucrats playing dumb bureaucratic games. This is how societal selection works in current historical period.
As for this case, Kadyrov (or his inner circle) is known to be emo about any critic, and has been successfully killing the Chechen refugees in Europe for decades now. Ukrainians also seem to operate freely, which is a bit ironic when you remember that Ukrainian agents were taught in the same secret military schools Russian agents graduated from, and that Ukrainian oligarchs have mansions on Côte d'Azur and similar places right next to mansions of Russian oligarchs. I sometimes worry about their travel logistics in such complex times. Poor creatures!
Bullshit. Who says anything about punishment. They are being punished, then there MAY come a choice. If you are so hell bent on "deterrence" look after presidential pardons. And if you do not save your own spies given a chance, the next one you want to hire will direct you straight to the place where the sun does not shine
> When the victim fell to the ground, the perpetrator approached, fired three more shots and then quickly fled the scene. Robert K died at the scene," he added.
>Video posted recently on social media showed Skrepetsky at a Russia Day protest outside the Russian embassy in Berlin on 12 June.
>He had been carrying a painting caricaturing Putin and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, as well as a Russian flag tied to his trousers that had been dragging along the road.
The Russian trolls are out in force, suggesting that he might have been killed by some confused psychos or something.
It's not name calling. Russian disinformation farms are things that exist. A bunch of people in this thread are desperately pointing fingers at Ukraine and Israel.
The article also doesn't really outline anything that makes sense as a motive. I'd imagine there are a number of artists in Poland critical of ... pretty much anyone you care to name but especially the Russian leadership. Artists are hard to please.
The article seems to be hinting this was a Russian or Belarusian assassination, which might be true. Sounds like someone assassinated him. But if so there is a big hole to fill in the story on what a plausible reason is. Based on this my first guess would be that something in his private life spilled over, but I expect there is a section of the story that isn't in the news right now.
EDIT Also related only by the vaguest vibe, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeiweiCam is more what I'd expect for artistic dissidents and is truly remarkable modern art.
> The article also doesn't really outline anything that makes sense as a motive.
That is the whole point. You can't maintain a dictatorship if you let people get to the point of being a clear threat, because sooner or later, someone could slip through the cracks and take you out. You can't keep the leash this loose.
As a dictator, you must go after people for seemingly small things, such as merely expressing the wrong thoughts, making the wrong kind of art, and so on. That sends a message to everyone that even small transgressions carry an unacceptable risk, so if your neighbor keeps criticizing the government, maybe you should report them, not join their discussion club that may become a real political movement.
For a while after the revolution that established your regime, people are on their best behavior because you just finished summarily executing hundreds of thousands or millions for having the wrong views. But both in Russia and in China, it's been a long time since that happened, few people remember Stalin or Mao, and so you need to keep sending behavioral nudges in a different way.
Also, modern-day Russia embraces a "budget" / "disposable asset" approach to terrorism. If you're important enough, they will send an elite squad to poison you. If not, they literally recruit people on the internet to beat you up, set a warehouse on fire, etc. So you also have to look at developments like as something that's cheap and largely risk-free.
You can. Prigozhin, for example - the Russians have had an actual quasi-military revolt in recent times from someone who was publicly telegraphing that he didn't agree with the decisions being made by leadership. He was almost certainly assassinated by the Russians too. But that illustrates how real a threat has to be before it actually matters.
If this guy was having that sort of impact on the Russian discourse then the article is definitely missing a lot of important information.
B-but Curtis Yarvin said that dictato-err, "kings" are better for freedom because they don't need to care what the public thinks! /s
The people in the tech industry who have cheered on mafia style government in the USA should move to Russia and get a taste of what it looks like in its advanced stages.
No. And pretty obviously not, look at the response. For people to hear about political assassinations it has to make the news and be widely discussed. There isn't any point murdering artists to "keep fear high", that just gives them something to create art about.
The usual tactic is to brand people as troublemakers then try and limit the news coverage they get. Or hit them with a smear campaign which is cheaper, easier and less likely to attract negative publicity like an assassination would. As a bonus the smear approach also directly discredits the message they were spreading.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vadim_Krasikov