Russian President Vladimir Putin downplayed the number of his Russian rivals who wind up dead by citing assassinations in the United States when he was a boy.
In an interview released Monday, Chris Wallace of Fox News Channel cited several specific cases of Russians opposed to Mr. Putin being killed — political opponent Boris Nemtsov, reporter Anna Politkovskaya and spy-defector Sergei Skripal — and asked “why is it that so many people who were political enemies of Vladimir Putin get attacked?”
Mr. Putin, a former KGB agent once stationed in a Soviet diplomatic post in East Germany, downplayed the question, noting that “all of us have plenty of political rivals. I’m pretty sure President Trump has plenty of political rivals.”
A surprised Mr. Wallace noted “but they don’t end up dead.”
At that point, the Russian strongman, who was born in 1952, said that his political opponents do “not always” get killed and then referred to events in the U.S. from his adolescence.
“Well, haven’t presidents been killed in the United States? Have you forgotten about — well, was Kennedy killed in Russia or in the United States? Or Mr. King?” presumably a reference to the Rev. Martin Luther King.
He also resorted to a version of the now-somewhat-ironized Russian phrase “and you are lynching Negroes,” a reference to civil-rights leaders being attacked in the U.S. in the 1950s and 60s. Mr. Putin, repeating that Communist-era canard, said U.S. racial strife today means criticism of Russian/Soviet life is out of bounds.
“What happens to the clashes between police and civil society and some, several ethnic groups? Well, that’s something that happens on U.S. soil. All of us have our own set of domestic problems,” Mr. Putin said.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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