Dropping Like Flies

Yet another critic of Russia's Putin has died under mysterious circumstances.

Ivan Safronov, the military affairs writer for Kommersant, died Friday after falling from a fifth-story window in the stairwell of his apartment building in Moscow, officials said. His body was found by neighbors shortly after the fall.

With prosecutors investigating the death, Kommersant and some other media suggested foul play.

"The suicide theory has become dominant in the investigation, but all those who knew Ivan Safronov categorically reject it," Kommersant said in an article Monday.

He literally fell to his death. His friends and those who knew him believe that it was a murder meant to look like a suicide.

Another critic, who recently appeared on NBC's Dateline, was found shot to death.

Paul Joyal, a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer, was shot in his driveway just four days after he appeared in a "Dateline NBC" segment that was critical of Putin and his government.

After it was reported that Joyal's wallet was stolen during the shooting, some questions of a broader conspiracy waned; but Joyal's son Alex showed his father's billfold to a reporter from The Post, as Eric Rich writes this morning. Joyal was shot following a meeting with Putin's former KGB boss, Oleg Kalugin at the International Spy Museum, where Kalugin is a board member. The family refuses to speculate on the motive of the shooting.

This could be nothing but a serious of coincidences resulting in people who may undermine or embarass Putin's regime turning up dead. Or not.

This makes the third such critic to die under strange circumstances and doesn't count the mysterious poisoning of other rivals, like Viktor Yushchenko. Alexander Litvinenko was killed by exposure to Polonium 210.

The body count keeps piling up around the world, and the tie that binds appears to be the Kremlin up to its old tricks.

UPDATE:
Jammie Wearing Fool notes that criticizing Putin is bad for your health.

It certainly seems that way. That has a chilling effect on free speech and the press, though some are pressing the matter: The paper that Safronov wrote for, has an update on the now criminal investigation of Safronov's death. Does his death have something to do with an expose he was going to run on arms sales to the Middle East?

The Taganka prosecutor’s office in Moscow has initiated a criminal investigation on the forcible suicide of Kommersant journalist Ivan Safronov, who died under unknown circumstances last Friday when he fell from a window in the stairway of the Khrushchev-era five-story building in which he lived. The police and prosecutor initially characterized his death as suicide. Safronov, who turned 51 last month, wrote about the army and space. It is known that he was preparing a publication on Russian arms deliveries to the Middle East that could have caused a major scandal.

Good for the paper to push forward despite the fact that it is putting other journalists in harm's way.