The past month has seen three high-profile killings in Moscow: Central Bank official Andrei Kozlov, crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and most recently, Aleksandr Plokhin, a manager with Vneshtorgbank, Russia’s second-largest bank. All three crimes are widely viewed as contract killings reminiscent of the wave of killings that characterized the “Wild West” period in Russia in the 1990s. Russia under President Vladimir Putin seemed a safer place compared to the 1990s — when the killing of politicians, businessmen, and bankers seemed to be an almost daily occurrence. But that impression, carefully cultivated by the Kremlin, has now come under sharp scrutiny following the recent wave of apparent contract killings of leading figures in Russian banking and independent journalism. Full Story
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