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These fears certainly don’t seem unfounded. In a throwback to his days as a KGB officer, Putin resorted to intimidation tactics to silence his more prominent critics. In June, the deputy chief editor of a famously anti-government national newspaper reported that he was taken to a forest in the outskirts of Moscow and threatened with his life. Two months earlier, a female reporter from the same paper was attacked and beaten by two men in what authorities played off as a common mugging.In January, Umar Saidmagomedov, a local lawyer who worked closely with human rights activists, was shot and killed by police in the Dagestani capital of Makhachkala. While police officials maintained that they were fired upon first, Saidmagomedov’s colleagues believe that he was killed in retaliation for his work. Numerous other human rights defenders were threatened, beaten and killed throughout the year.And then came the Pussy Riot case, where three members of the group were sentenced to two years in a prison camp for their anti-Putin protest in Moscow’s main cathedral. The message behind the sentence was clear: dissent has its limits in Putin’s Russia.The Kremlin continued to flex its authoritarian muscles in July by mounting pressure on activist groups and NGOs. Russian lawmakers approved harsh new rules for election monitors, human rights groups and other politically active organisations, requiring them to register as “foreign agents” before seeking international funding. For whatever reason, Putin clearly doesn't like his people being happy.
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