Russian President Vladimir Putin Opens the Pandora’s Box

Calculated Moves and Unintended Consequences

Shankar Narayan
8 min readAug 26, 2023
In Greek mythology, Pandora opened a box releasing all the evils into the world (Licensed Image)

When President Vladimir Putin of Russia publicly eulogized mercenary tycoon Yevgeny Prigozhin as a man with complicated fate, his critics inside Russia got the message.

Loud and clear.

The Russian President is more than ready to complicate the fate of his critics and anyone who challenges him inside Russia anytime he wants. It is a tradition inside Russia, to offer everlasting peace to President Putin’s critics.

Political leaders Sergei Yushenkov and Boris Nemtsov were killed in 2003 and 2015. The current opposition leader, Navalny, is counting the bars in his cell, seemingly forever. Journalist Anna Politkovskaya was brutally murdered in 2006; she wouldn’t stop turning the light on the darker aspects of the Russian military’s actions in Chechnya.

We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it’s total…

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Shankar Narayan

He didn't care what he had or what he had left, he cared only about what he must do.