It was a dramatic start to the week in Russia.

On Monday morning, Vladimir Putin sacked his transport minister, Roman Starovoit.

By the afternoon Starovoit was dead; his body was discovered in a park on the edge of Moscow with a gunshot wound to the head. A pistol, allegedly, beside the body.

Investigators said they presumed the former minister had taken his own life.

  • Tuukka R@sopuli.xyz
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    8 hours ago

    Can someone explain why the inner circle doesn’t take this as a warning sign that Putin is dangerous and must be liquidated as soon as possible?

    They will all get killed (or “persuaded to suicide”) one after another if they don’t end the madman. Appeasing Putin will bring you nothing good in the longer term.

    • Diplomjodler@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      Because they’re too scared of him to do anything. Also, they’re part of a gangster syndicate so they accept this sort of thing as normal business. There will come a point when it gets too much, but I don’t think we’re there yet. And when it does happen, it’ll be fast and nobody will have seen it coming. Although many will claim to have done so after the fact.

      • Tuukka R@sopuli.xyz
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        6 hours ago

        Might be a cultural difference.

        A Finn would be too scared not to react under the contemporary Russian circumstances. They’d work with the motto “I’m basically dead anyway, so this way I at least bear a chance to maybe survive.”

      • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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        6 hours ago

        China’s been running a similar racket for like 60 years now, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. Putin gets it. Trump is figuring it out.

        • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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          2 hours ago

          Not exactly.

          There were attempts after Mao to try to remove the threat of dictatorship from the government. The Politboro operated as a full committee until Xi consolidated power.

        • Tuukka R@sopuli.xyz
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          6 hours ago

          We’ll see how that will go in the States. I just read a text about why there are so few pickpockets in USA, and someone mentioned that during the Paris Olympics people had tried pickpocketing spectators from USA, and got so frequently immediately beaten up by spontaneously formed mobs of Americans that the French police had to start actively intervening on the side of the pickpockets O.o

          Not everyone on this planet is like the Chinese and Russians. But, we are about to see.

  • barnaclebutt@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    It’s so weird that so many Russian oligarchs and politicians commit suicide by bullet to the back of the head or jumping off balcony but locking the door first. Something fishy is happening here.