10 Reasons Why Vladimir Putin is a Terrible Human Being

6. He Killed or Imprisoned His Critics

Recently slain Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov isn’t the first critic of President Vladimir Putin to turn up dead.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the business magnate who backed an opposition party and accused Putin of corruption spent more than 10 years behind bars on charges of tax evasion and fraud. Khodorkovsky’s prosecution was part of a Kremlin campaign to destroy the opposition and take control of Yukos, the oil company Khodorkovsky built from privatization deals in the 1990’s.

Anna Politkovskaya was another vocal critic of Putin’s war in Chechnya. She received death threats and was even poisoned once to prevent her boarding a plane to do investigative reporting on the Russian security forces atrocities in the North Caucasus. Her home was a safe place, until it became the scene of her murder. She was shot four times at the entrance of her Moscow apartment in October 2006, exactly on Putin’s birthday. Some say her murder was a birthday present for Putin by the FSB (the post-Soviet name of the kGB).

Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent was poisoned by a lethal dose of radioactive polonium, his tea spiked in a London hotel during a meeting with two former Russian security servicemen. After leaving the Russian Federal Security Bureau, he blamed the agency for orchestrating a series of apartment bombings in Russia in 1999, that left hundreds dead and led to Russia’s invasion of Chechnya later that year. In a statement from his deathbed in London in November 2006, he said he had no doubt that Putin personally was to blame for his imminent death.

In January 2009, a masked man shot and killed Stanislav Markelov, a Russian human rights lawyer known for his work on abuses by the Russian military in Chechnya. The gunman also shot Anastasia Baburova, a journalist from Russia’s Novaya Gazeta newspaper, when she tried to intervene. Markelov was known for his work on high-profile cases. He represented the family of a Chechen woman killed by a former Russian colonel in March 2000. He held a news conference hours before his death opposing the early release of Col. Yury Budanov, who had been convicted of strangling a Chechen teenage girl, but was later freed.

Natalya Estemirova, the Chechnya-based human rights activist was kidnapped outside her home in July 2009 and found dead in the neighboring Russian republic of Ingushetia later the same day. Her body was riddled with bullets, Russian prosecutors said — several shots to the abdomen, and one to the head. Estemirova had spent years investigating human rights abuses in Chechnya.

Alexey Navalny, a government corruption-fighting lawyer, famously branded Putin’s United Russia party “the party of crooks and thieves.” He has been a prominent organizer of mass street protests and has attacked corruption in Russian government, using his blog and social media. The Kremlin critic was arrested in December and after just hours he was found guilty of fraud in a politically charged trial.

Boris Nemtsov was a top official with the Republican Party of Russia/Party of People’s Freedom, a democratic opposition group. He had been arrested several times for speaking against Putin’s government. The most recent arrests were in 2011, when he protested the results of parliamentary elections, and in 2012, when tens of thousands protested against Putin.

Nemtsov was scheduled to lead an opposition rally in Moscow last Sunday to protest Russia’s war against Ukraine. But two days before the event, he was shot dead as he walked home from dinner with his Ukrainian girlfriend. The killing took place just meters away from the Kremlin.