Crime scene

Russia: U.S.-Russia relations aren’t taking into account Moscow’s growing number of mysterious murders | Jill Nelson

Illustration by Krieg Barrie

Russia's leading human-rights lawyer Karinna Moskalenko was due in Moscow for a preliminary hearing in a high-profile trial, but an onset of headaches, nausea, and swelling delayed her. Medical tests in the French city of Strasbourg confirmed her fears: mercury poisoning. Needless to say, Moskalenko missed the opening of the trial last month in a closed Moscow military court where she was to represent the family of Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent journalist and Kremlin critic who was shot and killed outside her Moscow apartment in 2006.

Politkovskaya was the third journalist killed from her newspaper and one of 13 journalists killed during Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's eight-year reign as president. And Moskalenko has won 27 cases against the Russian government in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The deaths followed by the mysterious ailment of Moskalenko added an element of crime thriller to the already soiled reputation of post-Soviet Russia. How thuggish can it go?