http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2007/3/5/132423.shtml?s=lh

An expert on Russian intelligence was critically injured in a shooting in front of his home in suburban Washington, D.C., just days after he charged that the Russian government was behind the death of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.

The shooting raised suspicions of Russian involvement.

The case might be waved off, were it not that it fits a disturbing pattern. Critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin -- journalists, politicians and others end up suffering violent deaths.

Paul Joyal, who works for a Washington-based government consulting firm, was shot on March 1 by two men in his driveway.

Days earlier he had said on "Dateline NBC" that "a message has been communicated to anyone who wants to speak out against the Kremlin: If you do, no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you, and we will silence you – in the most horrible way possible."

Joyal was an acquaintance of Litvinenko, who died a lingering and painful death in a British hospital last November.

Before he expired from the effects of poisonous polonium-210, a rare radioactive isotope produced almost exclusively in Russia, Litvinenko made a shocking accusation: He stated that Putin ordered his death to silence him.

Moscow fired off an adamant denial. Why would the Russian leader do such a thing, the Kremlin argued. After all, Litvinenko had exiled himself to Britain after being released from a Russian prison.

Litvinenko was jailed for saying publicly that in 1999 Putin, then Russian prime minister and designated heir to President Boris Yeltsin, ordered buildings in Moscow deliberately blown up so he could blame Chechen terrorists.

These bombings gave the Russians an excuse to launch an invasion of Chechnya that escalated the Second Chechen War and continued after Putin became acting president on the last day of 1999.

Battling the Chechnya separatists a second time gave Putin a favorable new image in his own land, with a 70 percent popularity rating among the Russian populace.

Kremlin watchers have found an emerging pattern: Putin cannot tolerate criticism, so he eliminates his enemies one after another -- sometimes by poison, and sometimes by a well-placed bullet.

Even the establishment press in the West is suggesting that Putin is a cold-blooded killer. An in-depth article in the Jan. 29 issue of The New Yorker was headlined: "Kremlin, Inc.: Why are Vladimir Putin's opponents dying?"

The magazine notes that since Putin took office, 13 journalists have been murdered in Russia after defying him. Almost all of those deaths happened under strange circumstances, and no prosecutions have resulted.

Other victims include a banker, a potential president of the Ukraine, and an oil executive -- all of whom were considered enemies of President Putin for one reason or another.

Of eight persons described here in a NewsMax tally, six died violently, a seventh barely survived a mysterious poisoning, and the eighth is now serving nine years in a prison in the remotest part of Siberia.

Yuri Shchekochikhin, a reporter at the small liberal Novaya Gazeta newspaper in Moscow, was investigating tax evasion rumors involving persons hooked up to the FSB, the Federal Security Bureau, successor to the notorious KGB that once was headed by Putin.
Shchekochikhin died in July 2003 of an alleged "allergic reaction," but it was never explained what he was allergic to. His family believes that he was poisoned, according to The New Yorker.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of Russia's highly successful Yukos Oil Company, was yanked off a private jet at the Novosibirsk Airport in Siberia in October 2003 by masked FSB agents.
His crime was aligning himself with Putin opponents, even speaking out against the Russian president in foreign capitals. Charged with tax evasion and fraud, after a mock trial he was condemned to serve a 9-year sentence at a remote Siberian prison.

Paul Klebnikov was founding editor of the Russian version of business magazine Forbes. He had been looking into corruption within the ranks of Russian business tycoons, with possible links to the government, when he was shot dead in July 2004 while leaving his office in Moscow.
The Russians said Chechen terrorists carried out the contract-style slaying. But a former high-ranking CIA official told NewsMax that "the Russians blame everything on the Chechens."

There were no arrests.

Less than three weeks before Klebnikov's murder, Yan Sergunin, a former vice-premier of Chechnya, who had reportedly promised to provide Klebnikov with information helpful to his investigation of Russian corruption, was gunned down on a Moscow street. Again, there were no arrests.

Viktor Yushchenko was a highly popular candidate to become president of the Ukraine republic, but was firmly opposed by Putin. In September 2004, he was given dioxin, a deadly poison that left him badly disfigured and barely alive, his health destroyed.

Andrйi Kozlov was deputy chief of Russia's central bank, and he was highly visible in his efforts to rid Russia of banks that were organized crime fronts -- efforts that Putin considered confrontational.
As Kozlov left a company soccer match last September in Moscow, he was gunned down in broad daylight.

Movladi Baisarov, a former special forces officer in Chechnya, had political ambitions as a rival to Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadryrov, a pro-Russian favorite of Putin.
Baisarov died in a hail of bullets on one of Moscow's busiest intersections last Nov. 18. Scores of pedestrians and drivers witnessed the assassination, some of them upper-echelon members of the city police. No one has been arrested.

Anna Politkovskaya was a courageous reporter for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper. Her endless printed attacks against Putin, her vivid no-holds-barred reporting about Chechnya and other matters won her praise and awards from as far away as Stockholm and New York.
But she knew she was marked for death. In 2001, while she was in Vienna, a woman who strongly resembled her was shot to death in front of Politkovskaya's apartment building in Moscow. Police believe the journalist was the intended target.

In 2004 Politkovskaya became violently ill from tea she drank on a flight to Chechnya. She was transferred by private jet to Moscow for treatment, but her blood tests and other medical records disappeared en route.

Last October, as she was carrying groceries up to her apartment, she was shot four times -- two bullets penetrating her heart and lungs, a third slamming her backward into her elevator. A fourth bullet was pumped into her brain from a few inches away.

The ever-outspoken Politkovskaya, author of several books, wrote in "Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy" (2004) that the Russian president is unable to erase his Soviet secret service past. "He has failed to transcend his origins and stop behaving like a KGB officer," she declared.

She also wrote: "Putin has, by chance, gotten his hands on enormous power and has used it to catastrophic effect. I dislike him because he does not like people. He despises us."

Litvinenko, the former KGB agent poisoned in London, not only blamed Putin for ending his life, he also said on his death bed that Putin was behind Politkovskaya's murder as well.

Her admirers mourned her at services in Helsinki, Paris, and New York. Muscovites laid flowers on the steps of her apartment building. Putin said nothing at all, until finally he was confronted about Politkovskaya at a press conference while visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

"Her influence on political life within Russia was very minimal," he said. "She was too radical."

Politkovskaya's sister, Elena Kudimova, was shocked by those words. She told Michael Specter, author of the New Yorker article: "It was like he was saying she was of no value to the Kremlin, so she didn't deserve to live."

How can the violent deaths of these victims and others be explained?

Last July the Duma, Russia's parliament, passed a law ordered by the Kremlin that allows "enemies of the Russian regime" to be assassinated wherever in the world they might be.

Experts on the Russian regime insist that law is what Putin wanted. With the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1991, excitement swelled throughout the Socialist Republics that human rights would again be recognized after so many decades of suppression.

But Russia now has less personal and press freedom than Third World nations like Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, and Sudan.

Indeed, the top American intelligence official, retired Navy Adm. Mike McConnell, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in late February: "The march to democracy [in Russia] has taken a back step. And now there are more arrangements to control the process and the populace and the parties and so on, to the point of picking the next leader of Russia."

For Putin, this decline of human rights is not a problem. He has called the breakup of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."