I have read everything I’ve been able to find about the case of the attempted murder of Oleg Kashin.

The suspects have been taken into custody and are giving confessionary statements.  Most likely they are just the hired triggermen.  They are employees of an enterprise that belongs to governor Turchak’s family.

However, our judicial system could not help but throw out a curve ball, one that sticks out like a big fat sore thumb:  for some reason the head of the enterprise has been allowed to go free — in spite of the detainees’ testimony and an audio recording indicating that it was he who had been the organizer.  That they released him against a signed pledge not to leave town is a violation of every imaginable and unimaginable rule for conducting an investigation; it casts enormous doubts on the investigation’s independence and suspicions about its desire to give the party that ordered the killing an opportunity to influence the organizer.

Although this has not been proven yet, there are few who doubt that the party that actually ordered the crime was Pskov Oblast governor Andrey Turchak.  There is a whole host of direct and indirect evidence in the case file, including the testimony of one of the actual perpetrators of the crime.  There is likewise the testimony of the wife of one of the perpetrators, in which she states that her husband had recorded an encounter with the governor in a café on a dictation machine.

Has anybody ever heard of a such a thing, where the probable organizer and person who had put out the contract have remained at liberty?  One against a signed pledge, the other not even questioned.  I have grave doubts that the investigation, which is giving them the opportunity to calmly sit down and discuss what to do next, is independent.

I am not particularly surprised by what is happening.  We are dealing here with the system of power that Putin has gradually built up based on the principles of a mafia grouping:  a “father”, “we don’t rat on our own”, rituals of signing “in blood as a pledge of loyalty”.

Something that looks like the mafia will eventually start to act like the mafia too.

Can a mafia successfully run a huge country?  I personally doubt it, and it saddens me that my fellow citizens are going to have to experience this for themselves once again, especially after all that our country has gone through in the twentieth century.

If the president’s personal appointee Turchak is not going to be questioned before Putin’s appearance at the UN, this will just be an obvious illustration that even the heads of mafia clans sometimes stand at this organization’s podium.

Then again, even cannibals have been known to step up to the UN podium…