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Putin's Willing Executioner
 He's like a cartoon villain, except that he's real.He can be pretty amusing, except when he's terrifying. He's a bit of a clown and more than a bit childish, but he's also one of the most powerful men in Russia. It is pretty much impossible to ignore Ramzan Kadyrov and he knows it. And the rambunctious Chechen strongman seems to be getting more brazen by the day. Kadyrov was at it again this week, posting a video on Instagram showing opposition figures Mikhail Kasyanov and Vladimir Kara-Murza in the crosshairs of a sniper's rifle. This comes just weeks after he called Vladimir Putin's foes "enemies of the people" and suggested in an article in Izvestia that they be placed in a psychiatric hospital in Chechnya--where he promised to double their injections. And, of course, he's widely believed to be behind the assassinations of the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, human-rights activist Natalia Estimirova, and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. [snip] What this suggests, according to some Kremlin critics, is that Kadyrov hasn't gone rogue at all. Instead, he is Putin's willing executioner-the leader of a death squad that can eliminate Putin's opponents with impunity, and with plausible deniability for the Kremlin. SMERSH (Russian acronym of 'death to spies') [snip] Of course, Kadyrov the Frankenstein monster, Kadyrov the Kremlin's boogeyman and willing executioner, and Kadyrov the extortionist are not mutually exclusive. In fact, he's probably all of the above. And, according to Moscow-based political analyst Nikolai Petrov, he may have made himself an indispensable part of Russia's political system-regardless of who is in the Kremlin. "Kadyrov has the potential to be a tsar-maker," Petrov told The New Yorker's Yaffa. "Not because he has more men at his disposal than, for example, the minister of defense, but because his men, tens of thousands of them, will carry out his orders without thinking twice. If the minister of defense tells his troops to storm the Kremlin, he can't be sure that all of them will actually do it. But Kadyrov can." Posted by: Sven the pelter 2016-02-05 |
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