It has been given the felicitous name “Sudden Russian Death Syndrome” by The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey. “It” being the seemingly long and ongoing chain of mysterious untimely demises of people who have been critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin or who have crossed him in some way.
The proximate causes of the deaths have been poisonings, shootings, falls from windows and, in at least one case, a plane crash. What they all have in common are their suddenness and the victims’ having raised Mr. Putin’s ire.
A recent victim of SRDS was Maksim Kuzminov, whose abrupt murder on February 13 in a parking lot in Spain came in the form of six bullets to his body and subsequently being run over in a car driven by the shooters.
Mr. Kuzminov had defected from Russia to Ukraine last summer, flying his helicopter into Ukrainian territory. And he didn’t go into hiding. Bad move.
A mere three days after his murder, an easier to reach target, the brave anti-Putin critic Alexei Navalny, died in a Siberian prison. Suddenly. He was famous for exposing corruption, investigating Mr. Putin and his inner circle, and for leading anti-Kremlin opposition movements
Back in 2020, he had survived a nerve agent Novichok poisoning but was arrested and imprisoned by Russia in 2021. No gun nor car was involved in his untimely death in jail.
The Russian prison service reported that the prisoner just expired after a short walk. He was, needless to say, dependent on eating the prison’s food.
A partial list of rebellious Russians’ strange passings would include the 2015 demise of Mikhail Lesin, a former Russian press minister, who had fallen out of favor with Mr. Putin.
He suffered fatal blunt trauma injuries from an unknown assailant. And, that same year, human rights activist Boris Nemtsov was shot dead on a bridge near the Kremlin. Also, with no arrest of his murderer.
But the list goes back quite a bit. Back in the summer of 2003, 53-year-old Yuri Shchekochikhin, a journalist who investigated corruption and organized crime in Russia, suddenly fell ill and died from “an unknown cause.” In 2006, 48-year-old investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in her Moscow apartment building.
The year 2009 saw the deaths of 37-year-old Sergei Magnitsky, who had exposed Russian officials’ corruption; 34-year-old human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov, gunned down in Moscow; 25-year-old activist Anastasia Baburova, also shot dead; and 50-year-old human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, cause of death unknown.
Then there was the failed 2018 attempt to murder Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military officer and British double agent, and his daughter Yulia, in Salisbury, England. The Novichok didn’t work in that case.
The list is longer. Space limits us here.
And now comes word that an abundance of indicators point to Russia as being behind Havana Syndrome, the mysterious condition reported primarily by US intelligence and military officials stationed in overseas locations. It has been expressed in symptoms including painful head pressure or vibrations, ringing in the ears and cognitive dysfunction.
First reported by US and Canadian embassy staff in Havana, Cuba, several hundred US intelligence and military officials and their families also reported suffering symptoms in China, India, Europe, Vietnam and Washington, DC.
Christo Grozev, a journalist for the online investigative news organization The Insider, who worked on an investigative report with the CBS News “60 Minutes” program, uncovered documents showing a link between the secretive Russian military “Unit 29155,” which is reportedly tasked with foreign assassinations and other covert activities, and a “directed energy weapon.”
One of the documents discovered revealed an award given to a Unit 29155 officer for work on “potential capabilities of non-lethal acoustic weapons.”
An “aptronym” is a person’s name that is regarded as amusingly appropriate to their actions. Years ago, for instance, a story in The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog noted the existence of a lawyer named Sue Yoo. Another example would be BBC meteorologist Sara Blizzard.
For us Hebrew speakers, another good candidate these days would seem to be Russia.
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