It may sound cynical to say this, in the face of the massacre of 140 people who had gone to watch a musical show. But the Crocus City Hall massacre, at the hands of a commando of Islamic terrorists, seems capable of solving a couple of big problems for Vladimir Putin. The main one that has already been discussed is that of providing Russian public opinion with a justification (the instigators are the “neo-Nazis” in power in Kiev, supported by the Americans and the British) to unleash unlimited hell on Ukrainian cities and, above all , impose a new mobilization necessary to send hundreds of thousands of unfortunate conscripts to the front. Another issue that can be resolved thanks to the collective shock caused by the massacre, however, is no less important from Putin’s point of view: it is the return of the death penalty in Russia.
Capital punishment was abolished throughout the Soviet Union in 1990, under Mikhail Gorbachev, and despite the progressive hardening of the Russian regime under Putin it was never officially reintroduced. However, for the most determined opponents of the autocracy which has been in power for 24 years, the death penalty was de facto applied: among the most famous figures, the former spy Alexander Litvinenko, the journalist Anna Politkovskaja, the tycoon and political opponent Boris Berezovsky, the liberal leader Boris Nemtsov, the overly ambitious head of Wagner Yevgeny Prigozhin and the number one of the opposition in Russia Aleksei Navalny. Now, driven by the national shock following the massacre of innocent civilians in a concert hall, it will be possible to apply it “legally” again.
However, it is easy to predict that the official reason already indicated “crimes of terrorism and extremism” will allow Putin to send to their deaths not only the four massacres of last Friday in Moscow, but several other inconvenient characters. Navalny, who has already been liquidated in a Siberian concentration camp, was labeled a “terrorist and extremist”. His former right-hand man Leonid Volkov is labeled a “terrorist and extremist”, who a few weeks ago was the subject of a brutal and “professional” attack in Lithuania where he had taken refuge to escape prison. Opposition activist Vladimir Kara Murza is serving 25 years in prison as a “terrorist and extremist”. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has already been falsely labeled as the “instigator of a terrorist attack”, and with him his “clique of neo-Nazis supported by the collective West”. With the approval of the people and the excuse of war, Putin will soon be able to get rid of his most determined political opponents on the basis of a Russian state law, even taking his state terrorism abroad to assassinate a foreign leader.
The path towards the return of capital punishment in Russia has already begun. The superhawk Dmitry Medvedev invoked it to punish the massacres, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peshkov said that “for now” Putin has not dealt with the issue.
Currently.
