How They Tried to Kill Me

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/how-they-tried-to-kill-me/

by microbyte • 3 years ago

325 104 3 years ago

nplusonemag.com

type_Ben_struct• 3 years ago

502 for me.

https://archive.ph/wDi29

Kapura• 3 years ago

The part that really got to me was this paragraph:

“That is what drives us crazy,” the detective said. “You come here and act like you’re on vacation. Like this is some paradise. It doesn’t even occur to you to keep yourself safe. We have political killings here. The Russian special services are active in Germany. Your carelessness, yours and your colleagues, knows no bounds.”

It's very difficult to reconcile what seems like the safety of Europe with the reality of a war that is being fought online as much as on the ground. Journalists have always been targeted by authoritarian regimes, but the connectedness of the modern world makes them dangerous even outside after leaving the country. Clearly this is what the Russian state believes.

0xDEF2• 3 years ago

I remember a few years back Iran send assassins to kill Iranian dissidents in Germany, Austria, and Belgium. The assassins were caught and politely returned to Iran on a private plane.

No punishment for planned/attempted murder.

The West is hopelessly naive about sophisticated and brutal adversaries like Russia and Iran.

selectodude3• 3 years ago

It’s not naïvety, it’s that that west would appreciate the same treatment when they send spies and assassins, which they do.

jackmott42• 3 years ago

It is more general than the west, it is that Good people are naive. They don't understand how many people are willing to lie and kill to get even petty gains from it. The USA is struggling with this asymmetry internally right now too. We are slowly and politely trying to prosecute people who attempted to overturn an election while they incite civil unrest and pass laws protecting themselves from prosecution

generic92034• 3 years ago

And how would the inevitably resulting prisoner exchange later benefit anyone?

Aeolun4• 3 years ago

Do you have a source for that? Because the story as told seems vanishingly unlikely. Maybe nothing could be proven but that they were there illegaly?

qingcharles• 3 years ago

Is it possible they had diplomatic passports?

Most spies are known to the host nations as they work out of the embassy under cover jobs with standard diplomatic passports, therefore they have diplomatic immunity if they run into trouble and the best the host country can do is permanently evict them.

foldedcornice• 3 years ago

This matches with an account by Bellingcat reporter Christo Grozev, who was interviewed by the Financial Times [1]:

"How does it feel, I ask, to be here in absentia? Grozev laughs. After the Russians indicted him “in absentia”, he posted a selfie video from Palm Beach, Florida, against a sunset backdrop. “I said, ‘If this is absentia, it’s a pretty great place to be.’”

"Is Austria the least safe European country? “Yes,” he replies. “While we [Bellingcat] were investigating the Austrians, they were surveilling me and I wasn’t aware of that at the time. They were doing so explicitly at the request of the Russians. That is deep penetration.”

"He says the Germans advised him not to settle in Germany. He last visited Germany in 2020 under heavy guard as a witness in the prosecution of a Russian who had assassinated a Chechen exile. “We are also investigating examples of Russian security services penetrating German political circles,” he says. “France, I would not trust them: they don’t even trust themselves. The only place in Europe I can come to safely nowadays is the UK.”

"He is still angry, however, at London’s Metropolitan Police for cancelling his and his family’s attendance at the Bafta film awards this year. “Hearing it through the grapevine was offensive,” he says. “If there is also a risk to my family, they should tell me directly.”

"Both Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, which is teeming with Russians, are off-limits, he adds. “Dubai is Vienna on the Gulf,” he says. “I have heard this warning from both the Emirates and Turkey — ‘Do not come here. We will try to protect you. We will never extradite you [to Russia]. But we can’t guarantee your safety.’”"

Grozen did his interview in the United States, where he is currently living. I suspect that the separation by the sea (English Channel for the UK and the Atlantic for the US) increases the security.

[1] (Paywalled) https://www.ft.com/content/03f220e1-6a7e-4850-bf4e-4b0f521d8...

5e92cb50239222b2• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/TOJCx

sharts• 3 years ago

Journalists have always been targeted by all regimes, “authoritarian” or not. When puppet masters are questioned by journalists, their lives are materially affected.

Julian Assange, Shireen Abu Akleh, etc.

There’s a reason most mainstream media reporting is the equivalent of 2nd grade book report.

kunley2• 3 years ago

Russia as a state didn't "descend into fascism".

It was always like that. For centuries.

I have heard stories about NKVD methods since childhood. The victims were my family members living in the estern Poland, after it was invaded by Stalin at the very beginnings of WW2.

What was happening before red revolution, during tsars rule, is in the literature.

It is funny how generations of intelligent, well-educated westerners live in denial, unable to admit that the barbarians have been always the neighbors. It never changed. The methods of .ru government never changed and the political whitewashing of it never changed.

PS. Ofc the first victim of Russian system is and has been the Russian citizens, murdered, robbed, brainwashed, dumbed down, manipulated and deprived. What is called by us "Stockholm syndrome" is a default life approach there.

sneed_chucker• 3 years ago

Right. The history of Russia, as fascinating as it is, is the same story again and again for centuries.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_from_St._Petersburg_...

mistermann2• 3 years ago

Especially impressive about westerners is their honesty about the shortcomings of their own nations.

willcipriano2• 3 years ago

I'm in the west and I'm often the only person in the room who is aware that the US has been murdering children in almost a dozen countries around the globe for the past two decades. Like they are vaguely aware on a surface level but they haven't really conceptualized the fact and say things like "Russias unprecedented invasion!" dramatically and as if they had a moral leg to stand on.

TheLoafOfBread• 3 years ago

Because admiting wrongdoing of Russia would go in face of their "America bad" mantra.

It is really funny to see western leftist pointing American imperialism here and there and when obvious non-American imperialism start happening all the western leftists are trying to bend over backwards to justify how Russia is not doing imperialism, how SVR and GRU squads can't be compared to what CIA is/was doing. Their doublethink is palpable.

giraffe_lady2• 3 years ago

This isn't really that inconsistent tbh. Your own country's transgressions should always be a higher concern as you have more moral culpability for them and more leverage to change them.

And one of the very core attributes of modern imperialism is using real faults in other nations to subvert, divide, and discredit local movements. It's hard to condemn another state without inadvertently contributing to your own state's nationalist propaganda.

FredPret2• 3 years ago

The rest of Europe (if Russia can be considered as being in Europe) went through centuries of war, revolution, upheaval, debate, and other forms of blood, sweat, and tears... all of it culminating in modern humanist thought. Modern Europeans across the socio-economic spectrum think of themselves as having rights and opinions and so on. That's a novel idea in human history (and one we should all heartily embrace)

Russia had more than it's fair share of heartache, but it is not an outlier in not having been through the Western European developmental pressure cooker.

ajuc3• 3 years ago

Russia is unique in that it was european enough to be the colonizer not the colonized (so it didn't get modern law from its colonial masters), and yet not european enough to develop a modern approach to human rights by itself.

dralley3• 3 years ago

The rest of Europe (if Russia can be considered as being in Europe) went through centuries of war, revolution, upheaval, debate, and other forms of blood, sweat, and tears... all of it culminating in modern humanist thought.

As Timothy Snyder points out, Europeans didn't stop engaging in imperialist wars because they grew morals and humanist thought, they stopped engaging in imperialist wars because in the 50s and 60s they either lost them all, or knew they couldn't afford to win them.

Russia may or may not undergo the same development, but losing in their war of conquest over Ukraine is a prerequsite to any kind of progress in this area.

FpUser• 3 years ago

"It was always like that. For centuries."

Centuries ago all countries were committing atrocities and all kinds of large scale crimes one can imagine. You do not even have to go back that far.

iavael• 3 years ago

After major political changes, such as the February Revolution or the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were brief periods of freedom. But, yeah, most of the time Russian authorities are quite oppressing and power-grabbing (even if not all the instances were fascist in a strict sense). Almost all major elections since 1996 have been rigged, for example. But many people in the West keep saying that every Russian is accountable for atrocities committed by the Russian government because they "elected" that government.

denton-scratch• 3 years ago

Considering that she's presumably well-informed about global affairs, her resistance to the idea that russian secret services might be out to kill her, and especially her refusal to believe she might have been poisoned, is rather striking.

It's almost as if she had no idea that russian agents have been poisoning prominent people in foreign lands for the last couple of decades. Perhaps she thinks she's not prominent enough?

These poisonings target "prominent" people because they're supposed to make the news; they're meant as a warning. From that point of view, a journalist counts as "prominent".

yorwba• 3 years ago

From the article:

It wasn’t that the idea of it “seemed crazy” to me. During my time at Novaya Gazeta, four of my colleagues were killed. I organized the funeral of Khimki journalist Mikhail Beketov, he’d been a friend. I knew that journalists got murdered. But I did not want to believe that they could kill me. I was protected from this thought by revulsion, shame, and exhaustion. It disgusted me to think that there were people who wanted me dead. I was ashamed to talk about it. Even with loved ones, let alone the police. And I felt how exhausted I was, how little strength I had left, that I wouldn’t be able to go on the run again.

ajuc3• 3 years ago

her resistance to the idea that russian secret services might be out to kill her, and especially her refusal to believe she might have been poisoned, is rather striking.

During stalinist cleansings people almost always believed others were imprisoned/executed for a good reason, but they were innocent so this can't happen to them.

troglotit• 3 years ago

Not exactly "prominent". It's just "department of poisioning" of GRU should rationalize their finances, so they need to show "results", i.e. just poison "enemies of state", even if you're helping LGBTQ kids, or small ethnic group, e.t.c.

dralley3• 3 years ago

Julia Ioffe has talked about some of the less-lethal intimidation tactics that are used against foreign journalists in Russia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1HWNcLDK88&t=5610s

SXX• 3 years ago

While she is not a noname journalist I doubt many people from Russian anti-war community would recall her name before this investigation. There are few dozens of journalists and media figures well known in Russia opposition, but she was never one of them.

So journalists expect big political figures to be poisoned or killed, but not one of them.

neilv• 3 years ago

I don't know about the veracity of this particular story, but I've seen something like that denial before.

Someone accidentally stepped on the toes of some lawless dirty-tricks entity. They realized this after the fact. But when they seemed to get neutralized with very evil but textbook action, they said, in desperation (close from memory) "But why would ___?! I don't have any enemies!"

I'm not sure, but I think, if they would've been asked just then, they might've contradicted what they'd just said, to tell you who probably did it, and why they might get any of that party's attention. That might've been some powerful psychology speaking just then.

I suspect they were verbalizing reversion to their self image, and how they wanted the world to be. Something like this just wouldn't happen to them, and they're not in that world of stepping on the toes of characters like this, and don't want to be.

(Also, in case of this journalist, note the bit about the German official with poor bedside manner, when speaking with a potential victim of a heinous crime. Maybe the official was interrogating, or angry, or that was just their manner. The journalist spoke of shame as a reason, which I guess might be the journalist's cultural upbringing about being tough and not being the oppressed, but the German also seemed to be shaming.)

fsloth7• 3 years ago

It’s really easy to be in a state of denial to anybody. Health issues especially. It’s not a character flaw, just common human nature. It’s really damn hard to perceive your own positin objectively.

invalidname3• 3 years ago

There's a cognitive dissonance of "this won't happen to me" that comes from years of walking on the line. She faced a lot of danger and intimidation and survived it. This created a survivor bias that made her discount the immediate danger.

I've seen this first hand. After a few missile alarms where everyone runs to shelters people start building confidence and stride gently. They assume that since they survived all the alarms, nothing will happen. I have that problem myself, I can't be legitimately afraid.

klooney• 3 years ago

Any time I heard about Novaya Gazeta, it was always them doing incredibly brave journalism. Sad to hear they got shut down for good.

runnig• 3 years ago

They moved to https://novayagazeta.eu/

5e92cb50239222b2• 3 years ago

They didn't really "move", it a different (though related) paper that lost some journalists from the old one who were unable or unwilling to emigrate and are kept silenced by fear for their personal safety. It is managed by a different editor (promoted from the old paper) and has a quite different feel to it.

0xDEF2• 3 years ago

The journalists that have been killed in/by Russia in the past 20 years either revealed corruption close to Putin's inner circle or human rights violations by Russian forces in Chechnya.

It was inevitable that they would also begin to target journalists who revealed human rights violations by Russian forces in Ukraine.

mnemotronic• 3 years ago

This is really scary, disturbing and infuriating.

AdamN2• 3 years ago

The German counter-terrorism forces hold quite a bit of blame here. These things happening on German soil are unacceptable and it shouldn't be the victim's fault.

What is German media saying about this?

Wronnay• 3 years ago

There won't be much discussion about that in Germany because it is old news. Every German knows that and this is not the first incident.

We have political killings here. The Russian special services are active in Germany.

This quote is the reality. It is well known that we have Russian, Turkish, Iranian and other spies here, political killings happen from time to time and sometimes we even have terrorists registered as refugees because our Government has no IDs from them (this happened back when we had many refugees from Syria - some of them were IS-Terrorists)

We don't talk about America, we talk about Germany where the Military is a joke.

mannykannot2• 3 years ago

What things could and should they have done here, if pointing out the author's naivete is unacceptable victim-blaming? The assassins are active in Germany because that's where their targets go, and the author's behavior both before and after the attack seems to have foreclosed on any effective policing.

Aeolun4• 3 years ago

Effective policing happens before someone is poisoned. Everything after is a bandaid.

invalidname3• 3 years ago

Assassinations happened on US soil in the height of the cold war. The Russians are really good at these sorts of things and it's pretty easy to do. As she mentioned, a person could touch her bare foot in the train to deliver poison. Spray her while moving next to her. Slip something into her drink.

Recognizing an agent is also impossible, they can't stop illegal immigration how can they stop well trained and documented foreign agents?

fmajid4• 3 years ago

Even by nominal US allies like the assassination of Orlando Letelier by Pinochet's secret services, by a car bomb in Washington DC.

pxeger1• 3 years ago

I corresponded about my trip to Munich over Facebook Messenger. It’s not secure and I knew that

Technically, this is intriguing. Is Facebook compromised, or do you think they compromised her phone, or the phone or whoever she was talking to?

proxysna• 3 years ago

Facebook work with cops all around the world, might as well be an official request from russian internal affairs.

SSLy• 3 years ago

probably MATE, not MITM

fmajid4• 3 years ago

Messenger does not yet have the same level of end-to-end encryption as WhatsApp, but they are working towards that.

NikkiA• 3 years ago

They had voice recordings of her, so it's unlikely it was facebook messenger

foobarian2• 3 years ago

I'm no assassin but wonder how someone could fail to kill someone with poison. Aren't there a million deadly choices out there that would do the job reliably? Is the FSB security apparatus this incompetent?

fsloth7• 3 years ago

Yes.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/12/21/europe/russia-navalny-poi...

But could be warning as well, ofc. The point is, we don’t know. Whatever the outcome, it’s a show of force.

foobarian2• 3 years ago

I guess it's better not to have a body, since it keeps things uncertain and doesn't give law enforcement cause to get involved.

invalidname3• 3 years ago

Not an expert, just guessing.

In the past they used radioactive poisoning which is pretty easy to trace back and caused collateral damage. That's problematic. Poison is very dependent on dosage and delivery without compromising the agent might be tricky.

Paradigma11• 3 years ago

I think its a mixture of incompetence, micromanaging (you need to use very inappropriate radioactive or chemical warfare agents like Novitchok) and indifference (since terror is a major goal).

Here are elite GRU assassins giving an interview to support their cover story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZatub49aIA

tim3332• 3 years ago

There seem to be a lot of people who survive. Navally, the Skipals.

And Russia I think is the only country with a government poisoning lab and policy to do this stuff? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_laboratory_of_the_Sovie...

ocschwar• 3 years ago

This story is being falsely flagged.

dralley3• 3 years ago

Unsurprising

bartread• 3 years ago

Agree, this seems like it's being flagged in bad faith. In probably 13 years of HN membership, and maybe 14 - 15 of readership, I've never seen anything on HN before that's accrued 250+ points and been flagged.

@dang I realise you're probably incredibly busy, but are you able to remove the flag, please?

t0bia_s• 3 years ago

Why was it flaged? Why falsely? There are plenty flagged articles recently, but without any explanation it's hard to find out why. Nobody learn from it.

At least we should have some options to set with flagging.

andromaton• 3 years ago

Thank you for asking why it's flagged.

(cargo cult) tagging @dang

fsloth7• 3 years ago

Please unflag this.

slantedview• 3 years ago

Why was this flagged?

fmajid4• 3 years ago

Russian propaganda or useful idiot Tankies.

How They Tried to Kill Me

Related Stories