Dmitry Sidorov’s latest op/ed in Forbes is a vitriolic, no-holds-barred rant, but he’s right that at least somebody should be angry about the Russian officers who stole credit cards from the dead at the Polish president’s air crash site.  I wouldn’t necessarily draw a straight line from this odious act all the way up to the top, but there is a conversation which needs to happen about why anti-corruption and police reform never make any progress in Russia’s power structure.

The four soldiers stole a credit card from one of the dead Polish officials and put it to work for four days. If these conscripts–hungry, sleep-deprived, beaten by officers and their comrades-in-arms, perhaps even prostituting themselves in order to make enough money to eat–get their day in court, the question of human dignity and rights will emerge once again, sending us back to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where the pigs set the rules.