Someone Is Killing Russian Doctors And Not Even Trying To Hide It
A lot of us have been getting lazy lately, and that apparently includes Vladimir Putin. In the before times, if he wanted to get rid of an enemy, he'd go full Bond villain with a poisoned plutonium dart or something. Now, he's just throwing folks off buildings like a straight-to-streaming mobster.
Okay, there's a chance neither he nor his lackeys are behind the deaths of three doctors in just over a week, all of whom were treating COVID-19 patients with various lack of disgruntlement and all of whom mysteriously fell out of windows. For legal reasons, we have to point out the non-zero possibility that there's a suicide epidemic among frontline workers who made themselves a problem to the Russian government. Sure, the ol' "fell off the roof" gag is a well-worn trick of the Russian admobistration, but even that scandal -- in which witnesses to a Putin-connected money-laundering scheme coincidentally met grisly ends -- also involved prison-beatings-for-hire and poisons that mimic heart attacks. No one would be so brazen as to just keep pushing people out of windows and insist it was these dang slippery floors, right? Right?
Once, maybe. Colleagues have speculated that the first victim may have killed herself after her superiors scolded her for potentially infecting others with the coronavirus. That sounds plausible enough, but as the week wore on, it also sounded like a good reason to get rid of someone. The next day, another doctor "fell" out of her fifth-floor office window. This one had no apparent suicidal ideation, but she had just finished a heated conference call with the regional health. She had also complained to her superiors about unsafe working conditions at her hospital. A few days later, after two medical professionals made a video complaining about working conditions and uploaded it to the Internet, one of them also fell victim to the strong winds known to blow through hospital corridors.
If indeed, these improbably similar events are connected, it's not clear who could be perpetrating them. None of the victims worked in the same hospital or even the same city, which implies some shadowy assassin roaming the country at His Majesty's pleasure, possibly with teleportation abilities. (If anyone had them, it would be Russia.) They're a shitty assassin, though. Even two window-fallings could be a coincidence, but you can't just keep going back to the window-falling well, especially since the last victim survived, though he's in critical condition. Let's hope several burly men are guarding him.
Top image: photo-nic.co.uk nic/Unsplash
