Category Archives: Politkovskaya

Three years ago, Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in the vestibule of her apartment building as she returned from grocery shopping.  She was murdered for her long standing and acclaimed reporting on Chechnya. Three years and no killer has been found.  Nor has anyone tied to the crime been convicted. There is not much to say about this case that hasn’t already been said.  Human rights groups in and outside Russia have repeatedly called for the Russian government to step up and do something.  Commentators, even some as unlikely as Princeton philosopher K. Anthony Appiah, have held the murder up as a testament to the lack of democracy in Russia.  Either we are all fooling ourselves in thinking that the Kremlin could actually do something; or all the pleas are falling on deaf ears.  Time is probably better spent barking at the moon than trying to penetrate the seemingly sound proof ..read more

The Nation‘s Katriana Vanden Heuvel (and wife of Russia scholar Stephen Cohen) has addressed the murder of Natalya Estermirova. According to preliminary reports, Estermirova was abducted and stuffed in a van.  Her corpse was later found murdered near a woodland area near Nazran in Ingushetia.  Estermirova had a direct connection to the Nation. She wrote a chronicle of Anna Politkovskaya’s work in Chechnya for the magazine in 2007.  About Politkovskaya, Estermirova wrote:

“There are those with a vested interest in keeping the Russian Abu Ghraib forgotten–so that they can once again kidnap and torture. Our task, however, is to uncover their deeds and to fight them. Anna was at the forefront of this work for many years.”

The final line of that article reads: “She is no more. Now it is up to us to continue her work.”  Well, Estermirova did, and like Politkovskaya, paid the ultimate price, most likely at the ..read more

It’s back to court for Pavel Ryaguzov, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov and brothers Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov.  Today, the Russian Supreme Court overturned their acquittal in the Anna Politkovskaya murder case.  Reports the NY Times:

The court said the four men, who were accused of assisting the killer of Ms. Politkovskaya, should be tried on the same charges in the same military court in Moscow. In ordering the retrial, the court sided with the prosecution, which argued that there had been procedural violations by the judges and the defense during the original trial, a court spokesman, Pavel Odintsov, said. Other critics, however, including President Dmitri A. Medvedev, cited the prosecution’s errors and unfamiliarity with the jury system, which is relatively new in Russia, in the acquittal.

A statement issued by the Politkovskaya family on Novaya gazeta‘s website said the following the about the Court’s ruling:

We recognize that the trial of every one of the ..read more

Evgenii Kolesov, one of the jurors in the Politkovskaya murder trial, was on Ekho Moskvy today and said the following about the sudden closing of the trial to the media:

“I can’t say that the initiative originated from us.  In no way did any of us demand this,” the juror emphasized.  According to him, the court secretary came to the jury room before the trial and asked them to sign a request to conduct the trial without the press, but “yesterday no one signed this request.” Today, the jurors for the Politkovskaya case addressed the court with a request to allow the print media into the trial.

It appears that the plot is thickening.

On Tuesday, it looked as if the Anna Politkovskaya trial would be open to journalists.  Today, the judge Yevgeny Zubov, decided at the last moment that it would be closed.  The reason he gave was that the jury refused to participate if the trial was open to the media.  Zubkov had already warned that he would close the proceedings if “a juror made a single request.”

Nevertheless, there are those that smell something rotten in the Moscow Military District Court.  Karinna Moskalenko, the non-poisoned lawyer for the Politikovskaya family, was disappointed, but not surprised. Is anyone? He says that the Zubkov had “not offered convincing evidence of the need to bar the public for the safety of the jury.”  “I could expect this is there were a threat to the jury,” she told reporters.  Novaya gazeta noted that,

It’s notable that a day earlier when the jurors were sworn in, not a ..read more

When I blogged on the “poisoning” of Karinna Moskalenko last week, I asked, “Was this a murder attempt, a warning, or just paranoia?”  Well now we definitively know: It was paranoia.  The French newspaper La Figaro reports that an investigation into the mercury that made Moskalenko ill was not planted there by a nefarious Putinite agent to sully another potential “fierce critic.”  Strasbourg authorities now say that the mercury came from a broken barometer left by the previous owner.  Moskalenko bought the car in August 2008 and just didn’t clean it.

One hopes that Moskalenko will now retract her statement “People do not put mercury in your car to improve your health.”  No people don’t, but it doesn’t help that when they do, they don’t clean it up.

I’m afraid that no matter what corrective Moskalenko provides, the damage as been done.  The articles echoing another Alexander Litivinenko scandal have already circulated ..read more