It took several days for the Russian leadership to respond this week to the murder of the prominent journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, and significantly President Vladimir Putin did so during his visit to Germany. Just as her campaigning reportage about Russian atrocities in Chechnya was applauded more internationally than at home, so has concern about her murder been expressed.
Nevertheless this is constrained by competing concerns to cultivate positive relations with a much more powerful Russia, whatever the reservations about its human rights failings.
Yesterday, Ms Politkovskaya's newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, published the uncompleted story she was working on when she was killed. It is an account of a Chechen man who said police passed electric shocks through his fingers until he confessed to terrorism.
In a letter he says he was extradited from Ukraine and handed over to law enforcement officers in the Chechen capital, Grozny. He was punched twice in the face and then handcuffed and suspended from a length of pipe between two filing cabinets in an investigator's office. "They attached wires to my little fingers. Seconds later they started to give me electric shocks and at the same time beat me with rubber truncheons," he said. "I do not know how long this went on for." The report said the man confessed soon after to taking part in an armed attack on police and is now in prison awaiting trial.
The murder of Ms Politkovskaya, a trenchant critic of President Putin, has refocused attention on Chechnya, where, human rights groups say, Russian forces and their local allies are conducting a campaign of indiscriminate violence under the cover of fighting an Islamic insurgency. Over recent years, often alone, she has courageously documented concrete stories such as this involving torture, mass arrests and kidnaps, many of them carried out by or for Mr Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechnyan prime minister.
Her assassination, together with that of other journalists investigating corruption and human rights abuses, serves to underline the steady drift towards authoritarianism, xenophobia and racism against Muslim peoples and other minorities in Putin's Russia, and an associated growing legal impunity.
In Germany Mr Putin denounced the killing and insisted it would be fully investigated. The Finnish foreign minister, currently holding the EU presidency, raised the question of how far this investigation will go, given that it may lead deep into officialdom. It remains to be seen whether his zeal is echoed by EU leaders when they meet Mr Putin next week in Finland.