The Russians — of course, it would be the Russians! — have figured out how to do it. It’s easy, it’s effective, and it’s cheap. They simply follow the advice of Ebenezer Scrooge: “Decrease the surplus population.” *

* Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843.

Scrooge, to his credit (if you can call it that), at least meant only that they should let the poor die of more-or-less natural causes: starvation, exposure, or illness. The Putin method, however, is a bit more direct and timely: eliminate the undesirables. The Russian word for it is likvidatsiya — liquidation.

That is essentially what happened last week at a detention center in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, not far from the Ukraine border, when six inmates — accused members of ISIS charged with acts of terrorism — allegedly took two prison guards hostage. Russian special forces simply charged the prison, freed the prison guards without injury, and summarily disposed of the six offending inmates.

Problem solved.

But what really happened that day? This obviously was not a mock prison exercise intended to free up six beds for six hypothetical incoming inmates. And how could these six accused ISIS terrorists — armed only with a penknife, a rubber baton, and a fire axe — manage to “[knock] out the bars of a window in their cell and [enter] a guard room where they took at least two prison officers hostage,” according to local media? [Al Jazeera, June 16, 2024.]

An earlier report from Russian state news agency TASS, however — quoting unnamed sources — said that the six inmates were in the central courtyard of the detention center, not in their cell. Hmm . . .

All I can offer here is a barrage of more questions:

1) Where were the prisoners, and what were six alleged ISIS terrorists doing together in one location, apparently unguarded?

2) Where did they get the penknife, the rubber baton, and the fire axe?

3) Didn’t anyone hear them whacking away at the bars, presumably with the fire axe (if that is indeed what happened)? That had to be noisy.

4) How did they get from wherever they were to the guards’ location — however distant or close it may have been — without being detected?

5) They allegedly were demanding transportation in exchange for the lives of the hostage guards. How far did they really expect to get before being overtaken and captured or killed? Were they that stupid? Have they never heard of drones?

6) How did the Special Forces troops manage to “eliminate” the six prisoners in a hail of gunfire without at least wounding the guards?

7) Who were these six prisoners? Were they associated with the members of ISIS-K who stormed Moscow’s Crocus City Hall in March of this year? (And, by the way, where are those guys now, and what’s happening to them?)

8) Is it within the realm of possibility that the Russian authorities themselves planned and carried out the execution of the six prisoners, creating the legend of their attempted escape to legitimize their killing?

*. *. *

I can only answer Question No. 8 . . . with a resounding “Well, yeah . . . of course it’s possible!” How many murders — of single individuals and groups of sacrificial lambs — have been carried out by the Russian government in the name of necessity, or expediency, or collateral damage? Too many to count.

There is a saying widely attributed to Joseph Stalin, though not proven that it was he who first said it: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”

It sounds like him, though.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
6/22/24