The heavily redacted report reveals nothing about how RT founder Mikhail Lesin sustained the blunt force injuries that killed him. And the Washington, DC, police won't say whether they reviewed three critical hours of hotel security footage between when Lesin was last seen alive and when he died.Newly released police files expose significant holes in the investigation into the death of Vladimir Putin's media czar two years ago in Washington, DC,
casting doubt on the official finding of how he died.
After Mikhail Lesin's corpse was found in a Dupont Circle hotel room on the morning of Nov. 5, 2015, the coroner determined that he had died from
blunt force injuries to the head, and had also sustained blunt force injuries to his
neck, torso, upper extremities, and lower extremities. A federal prosecutor closed the case last year, announcing that Lesin died
alone in his room due to a series of drunken falls "after days of excessive consumption of alcohol."
Now, the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department has
released 58 pages of its case file on Lesin's death. While
many parts are blacked out, what was released raises sharp questions.
- Nothing is said about the blunt force injuries that killed Lesin - or even about him falling down, which is how he is supposed to have died.
- A disc of hotel security camera footage from the hallway outside Lesin's room - including three critical hours during the period between when Lesin was last seen alive and when his dead body was found - was defective. Questioned by BuzzFeed News, the police department has repeatedly refused to say if it ever managed to review that footage, raising questions about whether Lesin truly died alone in his room.
The release of the police file comes as the West is grappling with Russia's increasingly bold interventions. In a
two-year investigation, BuzzFeed News showed how America's closest ally, the UK, has turned a blind eye to 14 deaths on its own soil that US intelligence
suspects were in fact hit jobs by the Russian state security services or mafia organizations, two groups that
sometimes work together. US spy agencies have shared intelligence on each of those deaths with Britain,
yet British police have ruled out foul play in every last case. US intelligence officials told BuzzFeed News they had been watching the pattern of suspected assassinations across the Atlantic with mounting unease, and Lesin's death aggravated their fears.
Comment: Others, such as Andrei Akulov, take a cautiously more optimistic view,
From Strategic Culture Foundation Whether this is some grand strategy on Trump's part or an intuitive "art of the deal" leap, Trump has, at least, injected some movement into a situation that has stagnated for decades. Who can make the most of it, the U.S. or Russia and whether the Palestinians' lot improves remains to be seen.