Ten Little Indians (Russians)

Would you kill a man for $5? Robbers in New York did. Three robbers were willing to kill Moises Rivera for $5.18. In Cobb County, Georgia, Anthony Welch was murdered for a $5 piece of costume jewelry. In Indianapolis, 19-year-old Terry Williams was killed for $5. There are people all over willing to commit murder for as little as $5. How many deaths would $500 billion buy? Maybe 10? Let’s count them.

My previous post discussed the half-trillion dollars in lost oil profits that would have flowed from a deal between Russia’s state-run oil company Rosneft and Exxon-Mobil had it not been for sanctions placed on Russia by President Obama. Sanctions Hillary Clinton would have kept in place, and that Donald Trump’s campaign operatives discussed ending in meetings with Russian officials. Russia then interfered with the U.S. presidential election. Trump was elected. Details of the secret meetings are surfacing. And so are the bodies.

Dead men tell no tales. Who knows what the man The New York Post calls Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “favorite driver” might have overheard chauffeuring Putin and others. We’ll never know because he was killed in a car crash in September.

Ten months earlier, Putin Senior advisor Mikhail Lesin – founder of RT, the Russian propaganda news organ instrumental in spreading “fake news” during the U.S. election – was found dead in a Washington hotel room. Russian media claimed the cause of death was a heart attack, but the medical examiner reported ”blunt force injuries.”  Who knows what plans Lesin might have been privy to regarding the upcoming U.S. presidential campaign? He’s certainly not talking now.

Russian diplomat Sergei Krivov died at the Russian consulate in New York on the morning American voters went to the polls to choose a new president. Initial reports said the cause of death was “blunt force trauma” after falling from the roof; but when journalists arrived on the scene the consulate changed the story to say Krivov had died from “a heart attack.” Apparently Russian heart attacks are much more violent than American ones. Buzzfeed reports Krivov likely "helped transmit cables (coded messages) in and out of the heavily guarded (consulate)." He was a man who would have known the details of any messages to the Kremlin from, or about ,the Trump campaign. Buzzfeed also quotes U.S. intelligence officials as saying "it's an open secret" that "the consulate is a staging ground for Russian intelligence operations." 

In my last post, I referred to the Steele dossier compiled by the highly-reputable former MI6 agent Christopher Steele that showed how the Russians had gathered compromising material that could be used to blackmail or pressure Donald Trump. Ex-KGB chief Oleg Erovinkin is believed to have assisted in drafting the dossier. Erovinkin knew a lot about Putin and Russian oil deals because he was an aide to former Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, who now runs Russia's state-owned oil behemoth Rosneft. Vox describes Sechin as "a shadowy figure who is widely seen as second only to Putin in influence" and a "friend and business partner" to Trump's Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. It was reportedly at Sechin's request that Putin awarded the Russian Order of Friendship to Tillerson in 2013. Erovinkin was found dead in the back of his car the day after Christmas. 

Christopher Steele fled his home in Surrey, a county southwest of London, and went into hiding, fearing for his life. He’s a smart man. He’s also an experienced intelligence operative who knows how the game is played. The British newspaper The Telegraph quoted Steele’s friend as saying after his name and nationality were revealed, Steele had become “terrified for his and his family’s safety.”

Russia's Ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, was assassinated on live television during a photography exhibition in Ankara on December 19. Hours later, Russian diplomat Petr Polshikov was found in his Moscow apartment with a bullet wound to his head. The gun was found under the bathroom sink. The details surrounding the shooting are unknown, but first reports suggest it may have been a particularly aggressive form of Russian heart attack. Andrei Malanin, the Russian Consul in Athens, Greece, was found dead in his apartment on January 9. There has been no official cause of death. Alexander Kadakin, Russia's Ambassador to India, died two weeks later on January 27, following a "brief illness." A month later, on February 20, Russian U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin died in New York of an apparent heart attack.

Sergei Mikhailov was the senior Russian cyber-intelligence official who reportedly oversaw Russia's hacking of the American presidential election. In late January, a few days after Trump’s inauguration, Mikhailov was dragged out of a meeting in Moscow with a bag over his head and arrested on charges of treason. Friends fear he may be at risk of a heart attack.

In my previous post, I told you about a meeting between Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen and Trump’s Russian former business partner Felix Sater that led to Cohen delivering a Kremlin-backed proposal to National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn’s office immediately before Flynn resigned. Presumably, the plan was for Trump to use Russian-provided blackmail to force out the current Ukrainian president so Andrey Artemenko – Russia's man in Ukraine – could become president and legitimize Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea. The meeting was arranged by Alex Oronov, reportedly a resident of Trump Hollywood, a group of condominiums in Hollywood, Florida controlled by Trump and a real estate partner. Oronov, a Ukrainian-born naturalized American and in-law of Trump’s attorney Cohen, "died suspiciously" yesterday.

Of course, these deaths could all be coincidental. To assume otherwise, one would have to believe that Vladimir Putin – a KGB agent from the day he graduated from college in 1974 until 1991 and head of its successor organization, the FSB – would be willing to murder at least 10 men to cover up any investigation into the Trump-Russia scandal. Is it conceivable Putin would order these men killed to protect a $500 billion oil deal? On the other hand, men have killed for far less.