"YOU, PUTIN"
a.k.a.
"THE AUTHORITIES"
are responsible if one of us
gets killed --
or better still, for keeping us
from getting killed in the first place --
BORIS NEMTSOV
IN THE GOVERNMENT
1998
Today, four days before the Russian presidential election, Prime Minister Putin, while on the one hand promising the electorate a brighter future by 2020 -- when he could still be president -- with the other did a bit of jujitsu on his opponents.
From the beginning, from when he was Prime Minister the first time, Putin has been dogged by suspicions that he was not above using deadly dirty tricks to achieve power. Today he was accusing the opposition of being ready to use a "sacrificial murder" to bring him low. They will, he said, "whack someone and then blame the authorities for it," Reuters reported.
Boris Nemtsov, a former First Deputy Prime Minister under Boris Yeltsin (see photograph above), and a long-time and vocal opponent of Putin's (see here), did not let this ploy go unanswered. Nemtsov, whom Kathy Lally of the Washington Post calls "a foe Putin appears to despise more than most" (a badge of honor?), called the Prime Minister on this latest form of campaign demonizing (mirror-imaging?): "If the head of the federal government, who controls all intelligence agencies, makes a public statement that he has information about such a provocation and such a crime, he must do everything to prevent it and not just publicly scare Russians."
"I, PUTIN" here
A recent profile of Nemtsov, here
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