'Capable of anything': How the '99 apartment bombings explain Putin's rise and regime
https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-1999-apartment-bombings-ukraine-175001959.html
There is “no serious doubt that Putin came to power as the result of an act of terror against his own people,” says David Satter, who has investigated the apartment bombings perhaps more thoroughly than any other Western journalist. “Someone capable of such a crime is capable of anything,” Satter told Yahoo News in a telephone conversation from Paris. “And the proper attitude towards him is deterrence, not partnership.”
Russian investigators and journalists who tried to investigate the bombings often ended up dead. Among them was Anna Politkovskaya, a fearless critic of Putin who worked for Novaya Gazeta, one of the last remaining left-leaning outlets in Moscow today. She aggressively covered the Second Chechen War; in 2006, Politkovskaya was assassinated in her apartment building’s elevator.
“Every American president has gotten Putin wrong,” says Satter, who in 2014 earned the distinction of being the first Western journalist since the end of the Cold War to have been expelled from Russia. “Some have gotten him outrageously wrong."