7d ago

Russian minister's death serves as warning to political elite

It was a dramatic start to the week in Russia.

On Monday morning, Vladimir Putin sacked his transport minister, Roman Starovoit.

By the afternoon Starovoit was dead; his body was discovered in a park on the edge of Moscow with a gunshot wound to the head. A pistol, allegedly, beside the body.

Investigators said they presumed the former minister had taken his own life.

18 comments

Obvious plot twist: he did not shoot himself
- It is also entirely possible he was “persuaded” into taking his life.
  
  Suicide, or spend the rest of your life in a Russian prison?
  Yeah, entirely possible this was a genuine suicide.
  
  Yeah it could have been a Rommel type situation.
Can someone explain why the inner circle doesn't take this as a warning sign that Putin is dangerous and must be liquidated as soon as possible?
They will all get killed (or "persuaded to suicide") one after another if they don't end the madman. Appeasing Putin will bring you nothing good in the longer term.
- Because they're too scared of him to do anything. Also, they're part of a gangster syndicate so they accept this sort of thing as normal business. There will come a point when it gets too much, but I don't think we're there yet. And when it does happen, it'll be fast and nobody will have seen it coming. Although many will claim to have done so after the fact.
  
  Might be a cultural difference.
  A Finn would be too scared not to react under the contemporary Russian circumstances. They'd work with the motto "I'm basically dead anyway, so this way I at least bear a chance to maybe survive."
  
  China’s been running a similar racket for like 60 years now, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. Putin gets it. Trump is figuring it out.
It's so weird that so many Russian oligarchs and politicians commit suicide by bullet to the back of the head or jumping off balcony but locking the door first. Something fishy is happening here.

18 comments