Putin the Poisoner strikes again
by John O’Neill and Sarah Wynne, Opinion Contributors - 04/01/22 3:30 PM ET
Russian President Vladimir Putin has set Ukraine afire, killing many thousands and reducing ancient cities such as Mariupol to ashes. His pursuit of dreams of conquest has led to his new nickname, Vlad the Mad. But long before he was Vlad the Mad, he was dubbed Putin the Poisoner.
His old moniker was in the news again this week after the chemical or biological poisoning of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and other Ukrainian peace negotiators, who suddenly developed inexplicable physical symptoms. It was hardly Putin’s first suspected poisoning.
He is heir to a century-long tradition of poisonings, beginning with Stalin’s establishment of the notorious poison lab known as Laboratory One in downtown Moscow and massive biowar facilities at Saratov, still in use today. When direct execution or simple disappearance was politically undesirable or impractical, Stalin used secret poisons and bioweapons like curare, potassium and anthrax to stage seemingly natural deaths.
As Soviet KGB defector Walter Krivitsky famously said, “Any fool can commit a murder, but it takes an artist to commit a good natural death.” A variety of famous people succumbed to Stalin’s poisons and bioweapons, ranging from the brutal founder of the KGB Felix Dzerzhinksy and Orthodox Patriarch Tikhon to the prima ballerina Anna Pavlova and short-story writer Maxim Gorky. It is also believed that both Lenin and Stalin himself were poisoned.
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https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3255920-putin-the-poisoner-strikes-again/
