Introduction

Mark Galliotti: Is Russia going back to the 1940s or the 1990s? Well, neither precisely, but both in a sense. During the Donbas conflict, there were periodic spades of the deaths of militia commanders on the Russian-pro-Russian side that looked frankly more like mob hits than anything else. In some cases, they may have been falling out over politics or, frankly, rather more likely criminal businesses. But in others, quite frankly, they seem to have been committed by the Kremlin, eliminating particularly willful troublesome individuals.