Call it “the Putin Plunge.” Russian journalists have a habit of taking it.  In 2007, Kommersant’s Ivan Safronov went out a fifth floor window in Moscow while working on a story about the sale of weapons by the Kremlin to Iran and Syria. 

Then just last week, Olga Kotovskaya fell 14 floors in Kaliningrad, just one day after winning a court case to seize back her TV station from the Kremlin after the government moved in to silence her reporting on political corruption.  The Guardian quoted Solomon Ginzburg, a deputy in Kaliningrad’s regional parliament:

“I have no doubt at all that this was a political killing.  It was murder. Olga was a strong, feisty woman. A year before her death, she came to me and said that a high-ranking official had urged her to drop her legal case.” 

In both cases, the authorities attempted to claim the fall was suicide, even though there was absolutely no reason to believe either reporter wanted to check out.

Putin has been slaughtering journalists since his first days in office, so that now Russia is one of the very most dangerous places in on the planet for a journalist to work, ranking alongside nations that are actually at war.  Not once has there been any serious effort to point the finger of blame at the Kremlin where it obviously belongs, and in most cases there hasn’t even been an effort to apprehend and prosecute the killer.

This is a fully-realized neo-Soviet state, liquidating anyone who dares to question its rule.  Such blindness destroyed the USSR, and it will destroy Russia exactly the same way.