Putin’s Russia – Silencing the Critics: Assassinations, Poisonings, and State-Directed Intimidation

How did an unremarkable KGB officer become one of the most powerful and controversial leaders in the world? In this special series of the 4 Minutes podcast, we closely follow Vladimir Putin’s rise to power – from his childhood in Soviet Leningrad to his intelligence career and the key moments of his rule that reshaped Russia and the world. What events shaped his policies? What are the roots of the current conflict? And what does the future hold for Russia?

Join us for this compelling series and understand how Putin’s Russia came to be. 🎙️

Transcript

Welcome to another episode of our special series Putin’s Russia. This week, we continue to explore the defining moments that have shaped the Russian regime as we know it today. In this episode, we turn to one of its darkest aspects — the systematic silencing of critics, opponents, and dissenting voices. We’ll examine poisonings, assassinations, and other forms of politically motivated violence that are not isolated incidents, but part of a consistent strategy to maintain control.

The killing of inconvenient figures has deep roots in Russian history. From the tsars to Stalin’s purges and into the present day, violence has remained a tool of power. Under Vladimir Putin, it has taken on a more sophisticated form — involving chemical agents, radioactive isotopes, and digital surveillance. The goal is not just to eliminate individuals, but to spread fear. The message is clear: “Nowhere in the world is safe if you defy the Kremlin.”

One of the most iconic cases is the murder of Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, popular reformer under Boris Yeltsin, and one of the few who dared to publicly criticize Putin. On the night of February 27, 2015, he was walking across Moscow’s Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, just steps from the Kremlin, when he was shot four times in the back. Just days before, he had been preparing a report on Russia’s military involvement in eastern Ukraine. His death, in such a symbolic place, wasn’t just a murder — it was the killing of hope for a different future.

Three years later, the world was shaken again. In the British town of Salisbury, former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a nerve agent called Novichok — a military-grade chemical weapon developed in the Soviet Union. Though they survived, a British woman died after contact with a discarded perfume bottle containing the agent. Investigators linked the attack to two Russian military intelligence agents traveling under fake identities. The story was cracked by a mix of journalistic investigation and open-source data. Instead of denial or apology, Russian state TV accused the West of staging a provocation.

But this wasn’t the last use of Novichok. In 2020, Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, collapsed mid-flight from Tomsk to Moscow. He was later flown to Berlin, where independent laboratories confirmed he had been poisoned with Novichok. Investigative journalists found that agents from Russia’s FSB had been following him for months. Navalny, after recovering, even called one of them under a false identity and obtained a confession — the recording made headlines worldwide. Upon returning to Russia, he was immediately arrested. He’s now serving over 30 years in a high-security penal colony under conditions that gravely endanger his health.

But the Kremlin’s violence isn’t limited to individuals. In 2014, massive explosions tore through munitions depots in Vrbětice, Czech Republic, killing two people. Initially seen as an accident, it was revealed seven years later that it was a sabotage operation carried out by Russian military intelligence — by the same men involved in the Skripal poisoning. The revelation caused a major diplomatic crisis between Prague and Moscow and highlighted Russia’s willingness to use force even on NATO territory.

We must also remember Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist who fearlessly documented Russian war crimes in Chechnya. She was shot in her Moscow apartment building in 2006 — on Vladimir Putin’s birthday. Then there’s Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer poisoned with radioactive polonium in London. His slow, public death sent a chilling message to all defectors: you are never safe. And Vladimir Kara-Murza, an opposition leader who survived two poisonings, only to be sentenced in 2022 to over 25 years in prison for “discrediting the armed forces.”

All these cases share a chilling pattern: silence, fear, and impunity. The perpetrators are protected by the state, investigations are obstructed, and state media flood the airwaves with alternative versions of events. Anyone who strays from the official narrative is branded a traitor or a foreign agent.

In the next episode, we’ll examine how Vladimir Putin rewrote the Russian constitution and built an authoritarian system ready for war — with its own version of the past and a strictly controlled vision of the future.

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Thank you for listening — we’ll see you in the next episode of Putin’s Russia.