Yeah, that sounds exactly the same as picking out Anna Politkovskaya and having her shot to death in the lobby of her apartment building.

I've got no trouble making a distinction between killing someone because of a mistake or even because of negligence and killing someone deliberately because they are writing things that are inconvenient to you. Come to think of it, neither does the law; the law has made that distinction since the middle ages. It calls one of those "murder", and the other something else.

Don't hide behind the law, it won't help you here. If you set fire to a building with people inside and they are killed that is murder because any person knows what can happen when you set fire to a building full of people. Such it is with launching drone strikes on family homes or town streets or marketplaces or restaurants. It is murder. No sane person bombs a home without the expectation that anybody inside or nearby may be killed. Calling those deaths accidental is a sick joke.

The law doesn't have a specific term for people who just have a callous indifference to the lives of others, but people throughout human history have used a lot of terms to describe such people. Today I will use the term 'scum'.

We can't even agree on the meanings of words, so I think the prospects of us productively debating politics are dubious.

Politkovskaya case is attributed to her activity in Chechnya, which falls under 'provincial oligarchs' rubric I mentioned upthread. That's pretty bad, but that's not the government still.

Both Politkovskaya and Litvenenko (of "death by polonium poisoning administered in London" fame) are most notorious for promoting the theory that the Russian FSB in general and Putin particularly were responsible for a series of apartment bombings in Russia that killed hundreds of people and formed the casus belli for the Chechen War.

So, attributing their death to "Chechnya" is a little like attributing a hypothetical murder of Sy Hersh to the Iraqis.

Shorter: no, I think you're wrong about this.