It is with less obedient people that he has problems – say, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, imprisoned for more than ten years after backing Putin’s political opponents; Anna Politkovskaya, brutally murdered in 2006 for her investigative reporting on his regime’s misdeeds in Chechnya; and Sergei Magnitsky, a whistleblowing lawyer who died in prison in 2009 after being refused medical treatment.