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The following editorial appeared in the Washington Post.

Reporting on Ramzan Kadyrov, the brutal ruler of the Russian republic of Chechnya, is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.

Two women who sought to chronicle the human rights abuses of Kadyrov’s regime, Anna Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova, were brutally slain in 2006 and 2009, respectively.

So were other Kadyrov opponents, including Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, who was gunned down four years ago. Last week, the man who replaced Estemirova as the representative of the Memorial Human Rights Center in Chechnya, Oyub Titiev, was sentenced to four years in a penal colony on trumped-up drug charges. With luck, he will survive. But no one is left to monitor torture, disappearances and other abuses in Chechnya. Kadyrov has eliminated them.

Having established a vise-like grip over his once war-torn republic, Kadyrov has built up a remarkable record of impunity. Chechen gunmen, some with direct links to him, were arrested in the Politkovskaya and Nemtsov cases, but investigations into who commanded them were blocked. Rather than take action to rein in Kadyrov, Russian President Vladimir Putin presented him with a medal 10 days after Nemtsov was killed on a bridge near the Kremlin.