That an opponent of Vladimir Putin dies under strange circumstances seems to have become a custom in Russia. Since the president came to power in 2000, dozens of dissidents have died in shootings, poisonings, torture, or other bizarre circumstances worthy of a thriller.
The list of deceased opponents is long and it does not seem that it is going to close. This same Wednesday, Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the paramilitary organization of Wagner mercenaries, who died in a plane crash north of Moscow, has joined. The oligarch also questioned Putin's leadership by revolting his troops last June. Although Prigozhin aborted the uprising, Wagner's boss went from being a Putin loyalist to an embarrassment for the Kremlin, even though the Russian president praised him at his farewell.
It is not yet clear under what circumstances the accident in which Prigozhin died occurred, nor is it clear whether Russia is involved in the event. But it is inevitable to think of all the dissidents who have died in different circumstances during the years that Putin has been president.
The first suspicious death dates back to August 2002, when Vladimir Golovliov, co-chairman of the Liberal Russia party, was shot in Moscow after assuring that Putin had to be replaced to end the "totalitarian" regime he had established. In October of that same year, Valentin Tsvetkov, governor of a Russian region, was also shot dead. The following year, in 2003, Sergei Yushenkov, also a member of the Liberal Party, was murdered in the same way.
In 2006, the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former spy poisoned in London by agents of the Russian secret service, became known. In 2021, the European Court of Human Rights found the Putin regime to be to blame for Litvinenko's poisoning.
Another of the most notorious murders was that of Boris Nemtsov, vice prime minister during the period of President Boris Yeltsin and one of the candidates to succeed him. Over time, Nemtsov's criticism of Putin increased, until he was shot in 2015 after encouraging the public to join the demonstrations against Russia's aggression against Ukraine. The Kremlin denied his involvement in the assassination, although a BBC investigation revealed that in the months leading up to the assassination, Nemtsov was followed by a Russian government agent linked to a secret political crimes group.
The murder of Nemtsov was added at that time to that of Boris Berezovsky, Putin's oligarch and protector in the early years of his term, who died in London in 2013 after going into exile and harshly criticizing the Putin regime, despite having also been a powerful figure. in Russia until the arrival of the current president.
Journalists have also been inconvenient for the Russian regime. In 2004, Paul Klébnikov, an American national, was shot. Already in 2006, the murder of the Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovsjaya, a critic of Putin, became known. Three years later, in 2009, the murder of Natalia Estemirova, a journalist who documented kidnappings, torture, executions and murders in Chechnya, came to light. Estemirova was kidnapped and later her body appeared in a forest. That same year, Anastasia Baburova, also a journalist for Novaya Gazeta, was also shot dead.
With all these cases on the table and after the recent death of Prigozhin, Putin's responses in an interview he gave in 2018 are prescient. The journalist asked the president if he was capable of forgiving, to which Putin replied "yes, but not all". The interviewer asked: "What are you unable to forgive?" Putin responded emphatically: "The betrayal."
