The specific claim I was responding to, clearly, was "It you want to claim the handful of suspicious deaths around Putin".
The question isn't how many other parties have killed, though if you're going to go that route, we can add the the 300+ dead in the 1999 Russian Apartment Bombings,[1], the 3,404 civillian mortalities of the Russo-Ukraine war on Donbas (prior to 2022) and the 9,000 -- 40,000 UA civilians killed since 2022,[2] and the 30,000 civilian dead of the 2nd Russian-Chechen War.[3]
Note that I'm specifically referring to civilian rather than combatant deaths. Many of the specific acts of violence against civilians by Russian-allied forces constitute war crimes.
And yes, I'll anticipate that the US-Iraq War (2003--2011) in which the Lancet estimates over 600k excess violent deaths, and which was in my view a crime against humanity which I opposed then and now.
But that wasn't the question.
It was whether or not Putin is directly, through policy, and/or through practices responsible for only a "handful* of direct opportunistic deaths and assassinations of a principally political nature, in a way that none of the killings listed in the Wikipedia entry you submitted for US actions can be ascribed. And again, by no reasonable interpretation does that claim bear out.
3. Comprising the period 7 August 1999 -- 30 April 2009, and specifically excluding the earlier first Chechen war 1994--1996 with ~100k dead, but not on Putin's watch. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chechen_War>
Addressing a dead reply which criticises my Chechen numbers as being excessively low: that error would only amplify the point I'm making here.
I'd similarly chosen the largest credible number I could find for Iraq War deaths. Both would be examples of steelmanning my argument, which is in contrast to the comments I'd been responding to.
