The Patriot Post® · Putin's Gangster Regime

Jeff Jacoby: “‘I’m afraid Putin will kill me,’ Boris Nemtsov told a Russian website on February 10. He was dead before the month was out. The charismatic opposition leader, a former deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, was assassinated in the heart of Moscow on Friday night as he walked over a bridge near Red Square, only yards from the Kremlin walls. … Did Putin order the latest assassination? As Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion and longtime Nemtsov friend, noted over the weekend, whether or not Putin issued a directive is beside the point. The Russian strongman ‘is directly responsible for creating the conditions in which these outrages occur with such terrible frequency.’ … In such a culture of fear, there is little point asking who gave the order to kill. Ask rather whose killing will be ordered next. And ask an even more pressing question: When will American policymakers stop treating Putin’s regime as anything but the gangster state that it is? For those with eyes to see, there has never been any mystery about Putin’s ways and means. … He is a brute, one who scruples at nothing in his pursuit of power, wealth, and the breaking of his opponents. … Washington can best give meaning to Nemtsov’s death by emulating the resolve and courage he embodied in life. Condolences won’t slow Putin’s aggression. Backbone is a different story.”