Conspiracy theory, Russian style, or maybe a Russian mystery.
2014-11-25
Posted by: badanov
This was posted to my Facebook account 12 days ago
By Chris Covert Rantburg.com
Last month, a popular politician for Donetsk, Pavel Gubarev, was wounded in an assassination attempt near the Russian border. At the time, it was speculated that the Ukrainian interior ministry was responsible, thus ruling out the Rooshuns. The reason for the dismissal was, were the Russians involved, Gubarev, his driver and everyone at the scene wound have been killed.
Now, I found out that someone at a Live Journal site posited that the attack was actually an attempt to kidnap Gubarev. To my mind, that doesn't change the calculus much.
If Andrei Zakharchenko, the man who won election as president and prime minister of Donetsk -- and who Gubarev wound have run against had he filed in time -- had authored the incident, it didn't help him much, and it is possible any disappearance of Gubarev could conceivably hurt Zakharchenko in the election, but, again, not by much.
I would rule out the Russians as well. The FSB only care about the great game, not some minor political figure for a future and former Russian oblast (province).
I would also rule out the Ukrainian secret service. As the post said, Gubarev passed through several checkpoints between the Russian border and the situs of the crime, and the Bad Guys would have had to as well. Disguised with false documents or not, someone could have sniffed out the Bad Guys were in fact Bad Guys.
For the Ukrainian SBU (Ukrainian secret police), there's the competence thing. Were it an assassination attempt, an SBU attempt would have made more sense. They hated the guy. He was a loud mouth and a troublemaker ever since he came up on their radar.
Since the Maidan coup last February, everything in Ukrainian government gets politicized including security which means the SBU is staffed with a number of true believers, and probably incompetents.
That leaves Gubarev as the author of the incident. He was a former public relations man, which means, to him, optics are everything. He said it was an assassination attempt, so it took two days before a photo of him at a Rostov hospital appeared on the Internet, sitting on a hospital bed, his arm in a sling, a single healed cut to his forehead.
Zakharcheko warned Gubarev that he would "destroy" Gubarev were he to run for president of Donetsk. That can be taken many ways, but in Russian and southeastern Ukraina, you can only take it one way. Gubarev had no chance to file, run and compete, and his putative opponents would have given away the game if he told them his plans. Why not just stage a kidnapping or assassination/kidnapping attempt? You hurt your worst rival, and no one would look into such an attempt, preferring to blame it in the Ukrainian SBU.
Neat, cheap, and you and your staff has a nice inside guffaw for a while.
Just my two kopeks worth...
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