Among Countries Targeting Their Opponents Abroad, Russia Engages Most Often in Killings and Other Direct Attacks, Freedom House Expert Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 11 – Among the countries that engages in the persecution of its political opponents abroad, Yana Gorkhovskaya says, Putin’s Russia displays “a high level of cruelty” and is  more likely to engage in murder and direct attacks, moves their host countries seldom punish Moscow for.

            The head of the research department at Freedom House says that such actions are intended to frighten all Russian citizens abroad and keep them from taking part in protests against the Putin regime (svoboda.org/a/rossiya-proyavlyaet-vysokiy-urovenj-zhestokosti-presledovaniya-v-izgnanii/33874609.html).

            Gorkhovsky lists seven countries – Iran, China, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Rwanda – of being guilty of attacks on the nationals abroad, with China engaged in more actions against its citizens than any of the other countries against theirs; but she says Russia is far more likely to murder or physically harm Russians abroad than any other country theirs.

            What is discouraging, the Freedom House expert says, is that Western countries rarely impose any costs besides one-time protests against Russia or the other countries that engage in such actions, a failure that means that governments involved have undoubtedly concluded that they can commit such crimes with little risk or cost to themselves.

            That in turn means, of course, that these countries, and Russia in the first instance, are likely to engage in more such transnational crime as they try to silence those of their citizens who have fled abroad in the face of repression and may have earlier tried to protest what the regimes in their homelands have done.