So was it a successful anti-terrorist operation or an audacious PR campaign that backfired?
Disbelievers in an alleged plot to kill Russian President-elect Vladimir Putin have even more reason for doubt, after Ukraine’s law enforcement authorities admitted they have no evidence to charge the two suspects.
The timing of the disclosure of the plot was suspicious, coming a week before the March 4 election in which Putin was re-elected.
Russia’s state-controlled Channel One on Feb. 27 aired the story of the arrest by Ukrainian and Russian security services of two men in Odesa, who said they came to the Ukrainian Black Sea port city on orders of Chechen warlord Doku Umarov. They were supposedly tasked to assassinate Putin with a bomb. A January explosion in an Odesa apartment killed Ruslan Madayev, one of the three suspects, police said, leading investigators to uncover the plot. The two suspects were identified as Ilia Pianzin and Adam Osmayev.
Ukrainian officials remain silent on the widespread suspicion that there was no assassination plot at all, but rather a PR gimmick to boost Putin’s re-election chances.
Yiry Boichenko, a spokesman for Prosecution General Viktor Pshonka, told the Kyiv Post that Osmayev “was accused of preparing an attempt on killing Chechen president [Ramzan] Kadyrov.” His extradition to Russia has been requested, Boichenko said. Pianzin, in turn, is being investigated in connection with the Odesa explostion, but Boichenko said he had no knowledge of the involvement of either in a plot to kill Putin.
Maryna Ostapenko, spokeswoman of Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), refused to comment on the case.
Kommersant newspaper reported that, based on anonymous SBU sources, prosecutors have no grounds to charge the men with plotting to kill Putin.
Oleksandr Skipalsky, a former deputy head of SBU, said he thinks that the law enforcement agencies were being used in a Kremlin-inspired PR campaign. “This all looked as rather funny propaganda operation,” Skipalsky said. “It is nonsense to prepare a primitive bomb in Odesa aiming to carry it through the state border.”
Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denounced as blasphemous any claims that the alleged Putin plot was a part of PR campaign.
“People in my position have to live with this,” Putin said about the alleged threat. “I have lived with it since 1999, constantly.”
Andrey Okara, a Russian political expert, finds it strange that Ukrainian police don’t promote the plot’s discovery, but instead avoid commenting on the case. “When the security services discover cases of such an importance, those stories become heroic [acts],” Okara said. “But here we see something between vaudeville and theater of absurd.”
