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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
In 2034 Sergei Khadzhikurbanov was supposed to be released from the penal colony. He had received 20 years for organizing the murder of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya. But he did not serve until 2034. At the end of 2022 Khadzhikurbanov went to fight in Ukraine as part of the Russian army. Within six months there he rose to battalion commander, received an official pardon from the president, and became a completely free man.
A person convicted of organizing the murder of a journalist is free again. And this episode encapsulates the whole story of the Politkovskaya case. Read more in an exclusive column for 24 Channel.
Russia managed to find the killers. It managed to find the organizers. It managed to imprison them. But after 15 years of investigation it still did not name who ordered the killing.
Why? To understand that, we need to return to Anna Politkovskaya herself and look at what exactly she was investigating.
Why was Politkovskaya dangerous to the Kremlin?
Politkovskaya was dangerous to the system not simply because she criticized Vladimir Putin: there were plenty of critics like that.
She was dangerous because she turned state lies into concrete facts: she found people who had been tortured by law-enforcement officers, investigated disappearances, named names, and showed how state violence was organized.
Official propaganda called the Second Chechen War a successful fight against terrorists. Politkovskaya wrote the truth about mass killings of civilians, abductions, and torture. The most striking example was the “Kadet case.”
To recall: in 2001 a policeman from Siberia, Sergei Lapin, callsign “Kadet,” brutally tortured a local resident, Zelimkhan Murdalov, in Grozny, after which Murdalov disappeared without a trace. It was thanks to Politkovskaya’s articles and pressure that the policeman received a real prison sentence. And that became a dangerous precedent. Politkovskaya showed that for a crime committed during a war you could hold accountable not an abstract “combatant” but an employee of the authorities — the so-called valiant Russian police.
Later the Kremlin handed power in Chechnya to loyal local forces, the Kadyrov family. Politkovskaya harshly criticized Ramzan Kadyrov, openly calling his circle criminals. Kadyrov in response called her his enemy. But she was not afraid and continued to show that peace in Chechnya was an illusion built on violence.
But it wasn’t only Chechnya: already in 2003 she conducted an investigation into the hostage-taking at the Dubrovka theater center in Moscow. It was Politkovskaya who established that among the terrorists was Khanpash Terkibaev — a person who was linked to the Russian special services. According to her investigation, he was able to leave the building calmly before the gas attack and the storming began.
If that information was true, a question arose that was far more dangerous for the Russian authorities than the terrorist act itself: what did the security services know about the planned attack, and why were they unable or unwilling to prevent the deaths?
Terkibaev later died in a car accident. He could no longer answer those questions.
Politkovskaya continued to ask uncomfortable questions about Vladimir Putin himself. In her book Putin’s Russia and numerous articles she personally criticized the president. She wrote about how the authorities use fear, propaganda, and violence to maintain control over society.
After her death Putin himself uttered a phrase that became one of the most cynical episodes of this story: the murder of Politkovskaya, he said, did more damage to the authorities than her articles.
An entire surveillance apparatus focused on one person
But if her articles were so insignificant, why did an entire surveillance system work around the journalist for years?
On 7 October 2006 Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in the entrance of her own apartment building in Moscow. It happened on Vladimir Putin’s birthday. But more important than the date itself is this: the killers had to know where Politkovskaya was. And they did.
The journalist was trailed by police officers during their working hours. They were led by Interior Ministry lieutenant colonel Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov. For 100 dollars a day per person the policemen established where she lived and which routes she took. That information was passed to the killers from a Chechen group.
From the FSB side the case involved Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Ryaguzov. He was linked to helping hide Rustam Makhmudov — one of the direct perpetrators of the murder who was already wanted for other crimes.
So the investigation’s question had to be broader from the start: who pulled the trigger — and who ensured the killers knew where to find Politkovskaya?
The instigator was never identified
The perpetrators were found. The organizers were found. But the chain suddenly stopped there. The Russian state did a strange thing: it investigated the murder well enough to imprison the perpetrators and organizers, but not well enough to identify the person who ordered it.
Anna Politkovskaya’s family and colleagues believe that 15 years of investigation were needed not to find the truth but to hide the real instigators. The authorities wanted to imprison only the perpetrators to placate society. At the same time the investigation had all the opportunities needed to probe the case more deeply.
The FSB was wiretapping organizer Gaitukayev’s phone when he was preparing the murder from a detention center. But when investigators requested those recordings, the FSB replied that it had destroyed them as unnecessary. The recordings of conversations on the day of the murder also disappeared.
Law-enforcement officers pressured witnesses not to testify against policeman Pavlyuchenkov. And instead of looking for instigators among officials or security officers, the Investigative Committee began promoting a version about the involvement of Putin’s opponents living abroad — Boris Berezovsky and Akhmed Zakayev. To support that version, the investigation used Pavlyuchenkov’s testimony, although no convincing evidence of Berezovsky’s involvement was presented.
A convenient construction emerged: the perpetrators are here, the organizers are here, and there is even a version about the instigator. Only evidence of who truly stood behind the murder is missing.
The European Court of Human Rights’ conclusion is especially important
In 2018 the European Court of Human Rights found that Russia investigated the case with gross violations. The court noted that the Russian authorities did not take the necessary measures to establish who ordered Politkovskaya’s murder. It was no longer a question of Russian investigators “not coping,” but “why the state, having the means for an investigation, did not do everything necessary to find the instigator?”
For years the investigation clung to one version — about Berezovsky — while failing to explain where important materials went and why the investigation never reached the instigators.
Not a single unresolved murder
A phenomenon emerges. If the Russian state truly wanted to find the guilty, why did the investigation stop precisely where the question about a possible connection between the crime and representatives of the authorities began?
And Politkovskaya was far from the only person whose murder left that question open. Former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London. Human-rights defender Natalia Estemirova was killed in Chechnya. Opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was shot dead in Moscow.
In all these cases questions remained about who stood behind the perpetrators.
It is precisely impunity that creates this level of violence. As Novaya Gazeta’s editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov noted, if the state does not punish those who kill its opponents, it effectively permits new violence.
The pardon of a killer
And now back to Khadzhikurbanov: Politkovskaya’s family learned of his pardon from the news. The journalist’s children called it a horrific mockery of justice and of their mother’s memory. They stated that the state gives people huge sentences just for their beliefs, but pardons real killers if they are willing to go to the front.
In 2006 the state did not answer the simple question: “Who ordered Anna Politkovskaya’s murder?” In 2018 the ECHR reminded Russia that the investigation had not established the instigator. And in 2023 the Kremlin itself showed how little a sentence for a person convicted of organizing that murder means to it. He was simply released.
The murder of Anna Politkovskaya is not just an unsolved crime. It was “solved” conveniently. Convenient for the authorities and the security forces: after all, the perpetrator is known — what questions could there be? The most sophisticated lie is a half-truth.
Politkovskaya was killed on 7 October — on Vladimir Putin’s birthday. But perhaps the symbolic gift from the Russian authorities was not her death, but that years later the system proved that a person involved in her murder could become free again if he turned out to be useful enough to the state.
That was the end of Anna Politkovskaya’s life — but not of her story.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Подарунок диктатору: як система вбила Ганну Політковську та помилувала її катів". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Channel 24.
