The truth can be fatal in Putinland

philip jacobson remembers a great Russian journalist, shot dead in Moscow yesterday

When the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the great Russian reporter who exposed the brutality of the Kremlin's war in Chechnya, was announced yesterday, my mind went back to a conversation we had 18 months ago.

I was researching an article about the alarming number of Russian investigative journalists - 15 at that stage - who had been killed in highly suspicious circumstances since Vladimir Putin came to power. Almost all of the victims had trodden on the toes of the authorities or offended powerful vested interests - often criminals enjoying official protection - during their investigations. "It's the same old story," Anna observed wearily. "Nobody who tells the truth in Putinland is safe."

Politkovskaya understood very clearly the risks she was taking with her remorselessly

“It’s the same old story: nobody who tells the truth in Putinland is safe”

critical coverage of the atrocities committed by Russian troops in the two Chechen wars. She always insisted there was nothing heroic about this: "I'm just doing my job, which is to tell the Russian people what is being done in their name." During a flight to cover the school hostage crisis in Beslan she became violently ill after drinking a cup of tea that she was convinced contained poison: she shrugged this off as an occupational risk.

According to her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, another article critical of the puppet regime of Ramzan Kadryov, the Putin-backed Chechen PM, was due to be published tomorrow.

On past form, this is destined to be another of Russia's media murders that never get solved: it is extremely rare for the authorities ever to charge anyone, let alone bring them to trial and there has not been a single conviction in cases of this nature during the Putin era. The respected Committee to Protect Journalists rates Russia as one of the most dangerous places for investigative reporting and has protested about this to Putin himself, but the killings continue.