by PRAVEEN SWAMI
Throughout Putin’s political career, dozens of powerful rivals have died—in circumstances far too opaque for Russian authorities to even trouble themselves with the pretence of an investigation.
From the Ludwig Bridge in Munich, the young man caught the tram to the Massmannplatz. Then, he walked past St. Benno’s Catholic Church, looking for the newly constructed Kreittmayrstrasse No. 7 apartment block. The dark blue car he was waiting for soon pulled in. The short, stocky man who entered the apartment struggled to remove his key from his coat, while holding a large bag of tomatoes in his other arm. Likely, he didn’t even notice the young man tying his shoelaces on the steps.
The kneeling assassin, Bohdan Stashinsky, his biographer Serhii Plokhy says, seized the opportunity to point the rolled-up newspaper upward towards his victim’s face. Then, he pressed a trigger concealed inside the newspaper that sprayed a gentle mist of cyanide over the Ukrainian anti-communist leader Stepan Bandera. The rebel died within seconds.
‘Liquid Affairs’: The women and men of the Thirteen Directorate of the Soviet Union’s Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti secret service, or KGB, used the almost poetic euphemism for their dark work. Through the Second World War, Bandera had collaborated with the Nazis, and now, with the support of the Central Intelligence Agency-backed Gelen Organisation, hoped to set Soviet-ruled Ukraine on fire. The Thirteenth Directorate had extinguished the threat.
Too loud, too crude, some purists of the Thirteenth might have thought of the air crash staged last week to eliminate mutinous mercenary commander Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the Wagner Group. The truth is, though, that President Valdimir Putin has proved himself a committed student of the lessons he learned at the KGB’s Felix Dzerzhinsky Academy, which he joined around 1975.
Throughout Putin’s political career, dozens of his powerful rivals have died—almost all in circumstances far too opaque for Russian authorities to even trouble themselves with the pretence of an investigation.
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(Thanks to Razi Azmi)