In March 2010, I wrote a piece for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about some incidents in which the Moscow police had shown that ordinary citizens’ lives did not count for much in Putin’s Russia.

In one case, the police forced motorists to park their automobiles at oblique angles to block traffic on one of the highways on the outskirts of the city. What the unsuspecting motorists did not know was that they were being used as human shields to stop a car driven by an armed criminal that was headed towards the police roadside checkpoint. The parked automobiles were supposed to be a barricade that would block the criminal’s car.