Russia, Russia, Russia!**

**Please read the title in a whiny Marsha-meets-Trump voice for full effect.

At this point there are so many Russia-related topics dominating the national discussion that it's difficult to keep them all sorted. The one about Russians dropping dead all over the place is one that has gotten only a little attention - mostly as a curiosity. With recent events in Britain it (Theresa) may be time to pay it more heed.

British Prime Minister Theresa May, who has formally accused Russia of the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia last week in Salisbury, wasted no time in expelling 23 Russian diplomats from Britain. She followed that up with a call for an emergency meeting of the UN to address this and other similar crimes with which the Kremlin has been involved on a worldwide basis. And make no mistake - they've been very busy cavorting about, full KGB-style, as if they're doing research on a new series of Bond films. 

In what may be considered a surprise move, Mr. Trump agreed that all the evidence supports May's assertion that Russia was behind the nerve gas attack. However, the administration has yet to offer any clues as to what our tepid response will ultimately entail.

Anyone else have something to say??

Here is a brief list of the Russian diplomats who've reached strange and untimely ends... all since the election in November 2016:

• November 8, 2016 - Sergei Krivov, Russian Consulate Duty Commander - in charge of securing the consulate from sabotage and intrusion. He died at the Russian Consulate in New York on the morning of the election. First reports had him dying from a fall from the roof of the building. Russia would later change that story to claim Krivov suffered a heart attack. Officers at the scene reported a blunt-force head wound, while still later the New York medical examiner stated that Krivov died of internal bleeding related to a tumor. One life to live, but apparently three deaths to give.

• December 19, 2016 - Andrei Karlov, Russian Ambassador to Turkey. He was shot by a police officer at an art exhibit in Ankara.

• December 19, 2016 - Petr Polshikov, Russian Foreign Ministry. Shot in his apartment in Moscow. Russian newspaper Moskovskij Komsomolets said Polshikov's wife found him in their bedroom with a pillow over his head. Underneath the pillow, police found Polshikov with a head wound.

• December 26, 2016 - Oleg Erovinkin, former head of the KGB. According to The Telegraph Christo Grozev, an expert on Russia-related security threats, believes Erovinkin is the key source to whom Mr Steele refers in the infamous Trump dossier. Mr. Erovinkin was found dead in the back of his car in Moscow. Initial reports that he had been killed were updated quickly to state that he had succumbed to (what else?) a heart attack. Sure. For more on this story follow the link.

• January 9, 2017 - Andrei Malanin, Russian Consul in Athens, Greece. He was found dead in his apartment January 9. One whole day later the Russian Consulate issued a statement saying that "forensic experts" concluded his death to be from natural causes. Greece must have some amazingly quick labs/autopsies.

• January 27, 2017 - Alexander Kadakin, Russian Ambassador to India. He died of heart failure following what has been reported as a "brief illness." This would qualify as perhaps the least suspicious of the deaths.

• February 20, 2017 - Vitaly Churkin, Russian ambassador to the UN. Russia's official line is that he died of a heart attack while working at his New York office. The US State Department has instructed New York's medical examiner not to release their findings on cause of death.

• March 21, 2017 - Nikolai Gorokhov, a lawyer for the family of Sergei Magnitsky, survived a fall from a fourth story window. Russian state media outlets report the incident as an accidental fall that Gorokhov suffered while trying to - get this - trying to move a bathtub into his apartment. He doesn't remember the incident, due to head trauma he suffered from hitting the ground at approximately the speed of four stories, but he says it was "no accident." At the time, Gorokhov was set to testify as a government witness in a massive fraud case originally brought to light by Magnitsky back in 2008.

• This goes back to well before the time we're discussing, but it bears too much on the conversation to exclude: Sergei Magnitsky was arrested shortly after filing his complaints, spent about a year in a nasty little Russian prison, and days before the law required he be charged with a crime or released he was tied to his prison bed, tortured and beaten to death. In a surprise move, Vladimir Putin stated that Magnitsky had succumbed... to a heart attack. Come on. Try to be more original.

• March 23, 2017 - Denis Voronenkov, former member of Russia's lower house of Parliament, expat Putin critic. He was shot several times in the head on the street outside a Kiev hotel by what the Ukrainian president characterized as a state-sponsored assassination. Surprise surprise, the Kremlin has dismissed this accusation as "absurd," even though he had reportedly received threats from the FSB (formerly the KGB). Following the shooting, the assassin was fatally wounded in a firefight with Voronenkov's bodyguard.

• August 23, 2017 - Mirgayas Shirinsky, Russian Ambassador to Sudan. He was found in the pool at his home in Khartoum, with "evidence of an acute heart attack." While on the surface this is one of the least suspicious deaths of the lot, the "heart attack" thing raises my eyebrow more than a little.

To tackle the long and sordid list of suspicious deaths of Putin foes would take much more space than I've got time to fill here, but in light of the most recent poisoning in Salisbury I'll leave you with a teaser and a link to a couple of BuzzFeed investigative pieces on the subject.

November 5, 2015, Mikhail Lesin, a former Putin adviser and Russian state media executive was found bludgeoned to death in his Washington, D.C. hotel room. The death occurred the night before a planned meeting with DOJ officials to discuss the workings of RT, the Kremlin mouthpiece that Lesin founded. The investigation concluded that Lesin had died after getting drunk and falling, apparently a number of times, in his hotel room. Some solid reporting from BuzzFeed News goes into more depth on this subject. “Lesin was beaten to death" stated an FBI agent. "I would implore you to say as much. There seems to be an effort here to cover up that fact for reasons I can't get into. What I can tell you is that there isn’t a single person inside the bureau who believes this guy got drunk, fell down, and died. Everyone thinks he was whacked and that Putin or the Kremlin were behind it.”

The fourteen suspicious deaths on British soil that BuzzFeed detailed in this article are now under further investigation by the UK on the orders of Home Secretary Amber Rudd. She'll get back to us on what the findings detail, but circumstantially I'd say there's something rotten in Moscow.

Taken as a whole these deaths read like a systematic extermination of anyone unfortunate enough to have crossed Putin or his cronies. Assassination of expats or foreign nationals on sovereign soil is an act of war - one which all NATO allies would be obliged to enter into should evidence be presented that Russia was complicit in the commission thereof. Should that occur the question becomes "Does the West have the backbone to defend itself?"