“A typical Soviet KGB officer — a president who spits on his own people.” — Anna Politkovskaya on Vladimir Putin. Exactly 20 years ago, on October 7, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in Moscow — on Vladimir Putin’s birthday. The direct perpetrators of her murder were convicted. But twenty years later, the central question remains unanswered: Who ordered the murder of Anna Politkovskaya? Today, on the 20th anniversary of her death, the European Union once again called for everyone responsible to be brought to justice. Twenty years. A journalist is dead. The person who ordered her murder has never been identified. But Politkovskaya’s importance goes far beyond her criticism of Putin. For years, she documented what the Russian state and its forces were doing in Chechnya — killings, torture, disappearances, “cleansing operations” and abuses against civilians. And she did not simply reduce everything to one man in the Kremlin. She also wrote about the responsibility of Russian society itself: its apathy, silence and willingness to allow the system to consolidate its power. That is why her work feels so terrifyingly relevant today. Chechnya showed what impunity could produce. State violence became normalised. Crimes went unpunished. Society learned to look away. And the machinery did not disappear — it grew. Years later, we have seen that machinery turned against Georgia and Ukraine. Politkovskaya’s words about the system she documented sound more frightening today not because they have become outdated, but because we know what happened next. #AnnaPolitkovskaya #Russia #Chechnya #Ukraine #FreeChechnya