Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

A drive-by shooting done by a Chicago street-gang? Sorry, Chicago gangs aren't that good. They're good at killing all right, but hitting their intended target and no one else in a drive by? Nope, they're not that good. This was a high-level assassination, done by professionals.

I get it, all too clear. Something "happens" to the most likely man to replace Putin in the next vote, he gets offed--- Putin or his goons are the most likely source of the outrage. This will never do of course, so RJHowie sides with his hero to try to save the day.

The last time I saw Boris Nemtsov, in Tallinn, Estonia in 2013, he had wanted to find a way to tack on more Putin regime officials to a U.S. law that would ban them from entering the country or freeze whatever assets they held here. The former first deputy prime minister of Russia, who was brutally shot to death within eyeshot of the Kremlin this evening, had many enemies, not least of them the president of Russia. He was handsome, charismatic and popular in the West and in Eastern Europe. “First we liberate Belarus, and then Russia!” former Belarusian presidential candidate, dissident and Lukashenko torture victim Andrei Sannikov told him on that same occasion. Nemtsov joyfully agreed. On Sunday he had planned to lead a march against Vladimir Putin’s unacknowledged dirty war in Ukraine

Two years ago, Nemtsov and his colleague Leonid Martynyuk released a report titled, “Winter Olympics in the Sub-Tropics: Corruption and Abuse in Sochi,” which alleged that Putin had personally overseen the enormous, profligate project and was therefore responsible for the estimated $26 billion frittered away in “embezzlement and kickbacks.” They named names. 

Germany?

Germany?

Quote from: tt92 on 2015-03-04, 01:43:51

Germany?

Before this is over, it will be Ukraine itself at least in state controlled Russian media.

@Krake. State-controlled media from Russia offers apologetics and denies to what the rest of the world finds blindingly obvious.

The media is part of the corporate control hands which you choose to ignore because it does not suit

Enemies of Vladimir Putin have a way of winding up dead.

Whether they are poisoned, gunned down on the streets of Moscow or blown to bits in their homes, people who have crossed or merely criticized the Russian president have turned up dead around the world. Putin political adversary Boris Nemtsov, who was shot and killed near the Kremlin last week, is only the latest in a long line that includes hundreds of journalists, human rights activists and businessmen.

Among the more notable cases:

Sergei Yushenkov was gunned down in front of his home in April 2003. Yushenkov was part of a commission that investigated claims the KGB orchestrated bombings to ignite support for Putin’s war against Chechnya. A second member of the commission was fatally poisoned, a third nearly lost his life after being severely beaten, and the attorney for the commission was imprisoned for espionage.
Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov was shot to death in Moscow in July 2004, after he reportedly uncovered a money-laundering scheme that reached the highest levels of the Kremlin. Two suspects were charged, but later acquitted. He was one of more than 300 journalists in Russia who have disappeared or been murdered since 1993, according to a June 2009 report from the International Federation of Journalists.
In June 2004, human rights advocate and professor Nikolai Girenko was assassinated in his home.
Andrei Kozlov, a top official at Russia’s Central Bank who dedicated his career to eliminating money laundering, was killed in September 2006.
Anna Politkovskaya, who wrote books and articles accusing Putin of human rights violations in Chechnya, was executed in an elevator in her Moscow apartment building on Oct. 7, 2006.
Human rights attorney Stanislav Markelov was shot in the head in January 2009, as he left a press conference where he announced plans to sue the Russian government. Journalism student Anastasia Barburova was killed as she tried to intervene.
Human rights journalist Natalia Estemirova, was killed in July 2009, after being kidnapped from her home in Chechnya.
Two well-known cases of the poisoning of Putin adversaries involved former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.

The world saw the effects of dioxin poisoning on the face of Yuschenko in 2004, when he was running for the office he held until 2010. The poisoning followed an assassination attempt, and although no one was ever charged, suspicion focused on the Kremlin which, in a twist that foreshadowed by a decade the current tension between Moscow and Kiev, may have feared Yuschenko would take Ukraine toward better relations with western Europe.

Litvinenko, who authored the Kremlin expose “Blowing up Russia,” and was living under asylum in Great Britain, was given a fatal dose of Polonium in November 2006. The main suspect is reportedly former KGB agent and Putin crony Andrey Lugovoy, who has since been elected to Russia’s Duman, putting him out of reach of extradition laws.

“Putin gets away with it because the Russian state controls the media in Russia, it rules with an iron fist, and Russians are deeply afraid of their own government,” said Nile Gardiner, of the Heritage Foundation. “Putin sits atop a vicious tyranny. Ordinary Russians won’t stand up to the state. There is a climate of fear with the Putin regime exercising a vise-like grip over the Russian people.”

"The most serious attention should be paid to high-profile crimes, including the ones with a political subtext. Russia should be devoid at last of the kind of shame and tragedies that we have recently endured and seen," he said in a speech during a meeting with officials from the interior ministry.

"I mean the murder, the audacious murder of Boris Nemtsov right in the centre of the capital," he said.

Buried within the Kremlin the old black heart of the Soviet Union still beats from time to time.

In the Carnegie poll last year, 42 percent of Russian respondents named Stalin as the most influential historical figure.

"Vladimir Putin's Russia of 2012 needs symbols of authority and national strength, however controversial they may be, to validate the newly authoritarian political order," Gudkov wrote in the Carnegie report. "Stalin, a despotic leader responsible for mass bloodshed but also still identified with wartime victory and national unity, fits this need for symbols that reinforce the current political ideology."

you have no damn right to shout rubbish about somewhere else.

The US thinks it has a right to control the world have military everywhere followed by corporate money people and some God-given right.

What you're conventionally forgetting is the US had to keep troops in Europe after the USSR seized control of the eastern half of the continent and that it's Russia now expanding it's military around the world, rigging the election in Crimea.

The US had to keep troops in Europe? Why? Because it was asked to do so? Out of American generosity?

No government of those countries dares to disolve them unilaterally.

Cold War, War on Drugs, War on Terror. The USA needs those wars like a junky to keep and extend permanently its military bases worldwide.

Saying Crimea was a fix is typical. If you support a referendum anywhere then that is morally right but if you don't it is automatically wrong.