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Since you are there, please explain to us what people in your country think when you see journalist critics, and banking officials being murdered left and right. To me it would seem that someone is attempting to influence control of money, and media. Two essential things for any socialist/communist/fascist revival...

Firstly, there were 29 journalists mudered under Yeltsin, and 12 under Putin, but then it is easy for you to call Putin KGB. That said, here is an article from today's Moscow Times.

3 Suspects Arrested in Kozlov Killing
By David Nowak, Staff Writer

Three suspects thought to have killed Central Bank First Deputy Chairman Andrei Kozlov have been arrested, a Moscow City Court spokeswoman said Monday.

The arrests were ordered by the Basmanny District Court, the city court spokeswoman, Anna Usachyova, said. The district court is overseen by the city court.

Usachyova declined to name those who had been arrested or to give any information about where or when the arrests took place.

Also Monday, the Prosecutor General's Office announced it had identified the people who are thought to have ordered the killing last month.

The announcement was posted on the Prosecutor General's Office web site.

The web site gave no details about the people behind the killing or whether they had been arrested. It also promised to punish anyone who leaked information about the ongoing investigation.

"At the present time, the Prosecutor General's Office and the Interior Ministry are conducting an investigation to determine the sources of a leak about the tactics of a criminal investigation that under current law are considered a state secret," the web site said.

Police have conducted a reenactment of the killing at the Spartak sports complex in northeastern Moscow, the complex's chief of security said last week.

My note, actually the suspects have been named in another newspaper.

I missed posting part of the article. Here is the rest.

Viktor Paptov, a spokesman for the Prosecutor General's Office, declined to comment Monday on the case. Interior Ministry spokesman Pavel Klimovsky refused to discuss the leaks in question or what punishment they would entail.

Kozlov and his driver, Alexander Semyonov, were gunned down by two assailants on Sept. 14 as Kozlov was exiting the Spartak sports complex.

Kozlov spearheaded the government's efforts to clean up the banking sector and had put dozens of banks out of business during inquiries into money laundering.

Prosecutors were able to narrow the scope of their investigation to banks that Kozlov had dealt with two months before his death, Kommersant reported Monday, citing a source close to the investigation.

While it is unclear what may have prompted prosecutors to limit their investigation, it is believed that the suspects, all thought to be Ukrainian, were first hired in July to trail Kozlov. Kozlov was reported to have been under surveillance because he ignored phone calls from unidentified associates.

Kommersant gave the names of the three Ukrainian suspects as Alexander Belokopytov, Maxim Proglyad and Alexei Polovinkin and said they had been detained last week.

Proglyad and Polovinkin shot Kozlov and his driver while Belokopytov helped them escape, the paper said. The two shooters turned themselves in, saying they had been followed in the days after the attack and feared for their lives.

Proglyad and Polovinkin pointed police toward Belokopytov, who had fled to Stavropol to stay with friends.

Proglyad and Polovinkin apparently were unaware until shortly before Kozlov's death that they were supposed to kill him.

The two men were reported to have been hiding near the sports complex, waiting for Kozlov to wrap up a friendly football game with colleagues. They thought they were only meant to have a conversation -- about what is unclear -- with the banker. But as they were waiting, a stranger -- whose identity is unknown -- approached the two men and handed them each a gun. The unidentified man ordered Proglyad and Polovinkin to kill Kozlov.

Soon after, Kozlov was killed in the parking lot.

First, thank you for posting the article.

You said, "Firstly, there were 29 journalists mudered under Yeltsin, and 12 under Putin, but then it is easy for you to call Putin KGB."

Of course it's easy to call Putin KGB, because he was KGB, was he not?

Here's what it all comes down to; I'm very concerned about the safety and security of the U.S. when viewing the relationships Putin has created with China, Iran, Venezuela, N. Korea, etc... etc... Then add that with his reluctance to support the War on Terror even though the Islamic Radicals are the ones that perpetrated the Beslan Massacre and are causing the problems in Chechnya, etc...

Now, I will admit that perhaps it is from growing up during the cold war, but I'm afraid that Russia has just hid her ways to get the West off her back, and the plans for Russian dominance of the world are not really gone.

I truly wish the best for Russia's citizens, but I also wish their leaders would quit backing some of the most despotic regimes in our world. Seriously, why in the world, knowing full well the horrors that communism brought to the USSR would they support regimes that are actively oppressing their citizens by the same system and that wish to export their socialist/communist/fascist ways by force (i.e. Iran, Syria, Venezuela, etc...)?