The Pathway Paved With Tombstones: How Vladimir Putin Murdered His Way To The Top

The people in the picture below have two things in common:

1. They criticized Putin.

2. They are dead.

This account is being written because some commentators on the current war in Ukraine have tried to blame the Americans, Europeans, Ukrainians and everyone except the Russians for making war inevitable. They have posted webs of timelines and events — snares that actually fog the subject instead of clarifying it. Here we will spotlight the driver of the war, because war is never inevitable unless a personality drives it forward. Disputes are possible, perhaps inevitable in global politics, but Putin is responsible for turning a dispute into a war.

Further details:

Former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian defector, was poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 in London;

Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist, who accused the President of turning the country into a police state; she was murdered by contract killers who shot her at point-blank range in a lift in her building in 2006;

Russian MP Denis Voronenkov, who had fled to Ukraine, was shot dead in Kiev just before he was about to testify against the pro-Putin Prime Minister of Russia;

Former Russian press minister to Putin Mikhail Lesin was found beaten to death in a Washington hotel room in 2017.

Boris Nemtsov, the leader of the Russian opposition was shot dead in front of the Kremlin seven years ago.

Paul Klebnikov, a US investigative reporter and editor of Forbes Russia was killed in a drive-by shooting outside his office in Moscow in 2004; he had previously written about corruption in the country and investigated the ongoings of wealthy Russians;

Boris Berezovsky helped Putin rise to power but the pair fell out, and he moved to London, where he became an outspoken critic of the President and was found dead at his Berkshire home in 2013;