My latest Moscow News column looks at the assassination of three Chechens in Istanbul and the likelihood that it was a Russian intelligence operation (whether by the FSB, SVR or GRU). Obviously, assassinations are essentially Bad Things, and criminals ought to have their guilt proven in a court. While writing it, though, I did come to wonder how and why this was different from the drone strikes we see every week, Mossad (presumably) killing a Hamas leader in Dubai or, indeed, the operation against Osama Bin Laden. That’s a real, not a polemical question: in an age when terrorism is commonly transnational, and when the mechanisms for having insurgents (or their fund-raisers, logistical managers and ideological recruiting sergeants) arrested, tried or extradited are so often complex and legally- and politically-fraught, are we heading into a future in which such actions will become more, not less common? There’s already quite a solid body of academic literature in law, politics and intelligence journals on assassinations – ‘extrajudicial killings’ as the favored euphemism goes – which also reflects policy discussions. In an age in which high-speed communications has conditioned us and our masters also to high-speed responses, the temptation to reach for the quick kinetic fix must often be hard to resist for those powers with the covert capacity to carry out such operations and the geopolitical muscle (or indifference) to pay the potential political price.
The not-really-so-mysterious deaths of Chechens in Turkey – and towards a future of ‘extrajudicial killings’
Posted by Mark Galeotti on October 3, 2011
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/the-not-really-so-mysterious-deaths-of-chechens-in-turkey-and-towards-a-future-of-extrajudicial-killings/
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Mark Galeotti
This blog’s author, Dr Mark Galeotti has been researching Russian history and security issues since the late 1980s.
Educated at Cambridge University and the LSE, he is the director of the consultancy firm Mayak Intelligence. He is also an Honorary Professor at UCL School of Slavonic & East European Studies, Ernest Bevin Associate Fellow in Euro-Atlantic Geopolitics with the Council on Geostrategy and a Senior Associate Fellow at RUSI, as well as a senior non-resident fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague and an Associate Fellow of the Middle East Institute’s Frontier Europe programme. Previously he has been a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, Head of the Centre for European Security at the Institute of International Relations Prague, Professor of Global Affairs at New York University, head of the History department at Keele University in the UK, an adviser at the British Foreign Office and a visiting professor at MGIMO (Moscow), Charles University (Prague) and Rutgers (Newark), as well as a visiting fellow with the ECFR.
His books include The Weaponisation of Everything (Yale University Press, 2022), A Short History of Russia (HarperCollins, 2020/Ebury, 2021), We Need To Talk About Putin (Ebury, 2019) and The Vory: Russia’s super mafia (Yale University Press, 2018), and several Osprey books. He is a regular contributor to Jane’s Intelligence Review and The Spectator Coffee House blog, and is a columnist for Raam op Rusland, Intellinews Business New Europe and the Moscow Times.
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