Putin’s Assassination State

Ethical Oil

All states have their enemies. Just a few days ago, the United States succeeded in taking out Anwar al-Awlaki, a senior recruiter, propagandist and organizer for al-Qaeda, with a drone attack in Yemen. Earlier this year, U.S. forces flew into Pakistan to seek and destroy Osama bin Laden.

And this week, a leaked document shows that Vladimir Putin has been arranging for his own enemies to be assassinated. As Britain’s Daily Telegraph reports:

The Russian secret service authorised the “elimination” of individuals living overseas who were judged to be enemies of the state and ordered the creation of special units to conduct such operations, according to a document passed to The Daily Telegraph.

To some observers there might be no difference: the U.S. kills its enemies, Putin kills his. To others, including those of us at EthicalOil.org, there is a pretty obvious difference: Guys like Anwar al-Awlaki and Osama bin Ladin are murderous terrorists; killing them, interrupting their terrorist scheming, very surely has the effect of saving many, many innocent lives.

And who are Vladimir Putin’s supposed enemies targeted for state assassination? One would be Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB spy who went on to blow the whistle about Russia’s corrupt and brutal police state, exposing assassination attempts against other enemies, and the likely false-flag bombing of apartment buildings—killing 293 people—to secure Putin’s hold on power and justify his ferocious invasion of Chechnya. After fleeing to Britain, Litvinenko was killed by Russian agents who poisoned him with radiation.

Other Putin enemies? Dissidents and businessmen who disagreed with Putin’s neo-Soviet ideology. Also, journalists who exposed corruption and human-rights abuses in Russia. Since Putin took power, 98 journalists have been murdered, most of them apparently for reporting the wrong things. Frequently, but not surprisingly, the crimes go unsolved.

Unlike bin Laden and Al-Awlaki, people like Litvinenko, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya (who was gunned down in her apartment building in 2006 after reporting on Russia’s war crimes in Chechnya), and Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer recently abused to death by Russian police after exposing police involved in tax fraud, didn’t spend their lives trying to kill scores of innocent people. On the contrary: they spoke out—peacefully—against abuses of power and state-sponsored violence. Killing them saved no one’s life. Quite the opposite: Putin’s thugs did it so they could proceed unchecked with their agenda of abuse.

Those who equate assassinations by a democracy like the U.S. to these kinds of assassinations by Putin’s petro-fuelled thugocracy engage in moral equivalence. They’re the same sort of people who would argue that Canadian oil is no more ethical than Russia’s or Saudi Arabia’s because the Saudis’ and Russians’ grotesque records of human rights abuses are no worse than our record of, say, greenhouse gas emissions.

Ethical oil is about rejecting that kind of moral equivalence and accepting that some things are objectively worse than other things. Killing journalists and human rights activists is not the same as killing mass-murdering terrorists. And oppressing women, spreading war and torturing dissidents is worse, we say, than having a marginally higher carbon footprint than conventional oil producers. If you disagree, then it won’t bother you that your oil purchases could be funding the brutal, repressive regimes in Russia or Saudi Arabia. But if you do believe that there really are such things as right and wrong, then you implicitly understand the reasoning behind the concept of ethical oil.
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