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Boris Nemtsov murder means war, say Kremlin’s critics

THE murder of Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov marks the beginning of “open war” between President Vladimir Putin and anyone who opposes him, one of the victim’s closest collaborators said.
As tens of thousands of Muscovites on Sunday joined a march to the spot near the Kremlin where Mr Nemtsov was murdered on Friday night, Vladimir Milov, a former minister, said his ­colleague’s death could have been sanctioned only by Mr Putin.
It was “absolutely” a game-changer for Russia’s fractured and marginalised opposition.
“We are now in a very different situation,” said Mr Milov, a former deputy energy minister who with Mr Nemtsov co-authored a series of reports alleging corruption in Mr Putin’s governments. The pair had planned Sunday’s march, which turned from a peace march into a memorial.
“We have to make a choice: do we carry on and not leave the country, as they want us to?” Mr Milov asked.
“There are a lot of people who have this grief, this pessimistic feeling and this is exactly what this whole thing was aimed at. If we are committed to stay and continue the fight, which I am, we have to revisit what we are doing because now we are in open war, physically, not verbally.”
The organisers of Sunday’s march claimed 70,000 people took part, although the authorities put the figure at 21,000.
Hundreds of Russian flags with black ribbons tied to them fluttered in the drizzle as protesters trudged quietly past long lines of police towards the Kremlin and the bridge where Mr Nemtsov was killed.
Some carried black-edged placards with the slogans: “I am not afraid” or “Propaganda kills”, a reference to the widespread belief that state television’s attacks on opposition figures, including Mr Nemtsov, had created a climate of hate that made the killing possible.
Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister who joined the ­opposition, told the crowd the killing should be a turning point for Russia “for the simple reason that people who before thought that they could quietly sit in their kitchens and simply discuss problems within the family, now will start reconsidering everything that’s going on in our country”.
Thousands more marched in other Russian cities in the biggest demonstration of popular dissent since Mr Putin’s third term as President began in 2012.
A liberal deputy prime minister who had been tipped as a successor to Boris Yeltsin before Russia’s ­financial crash in 1997-98 ended his rapid ascent, Mr Nemtsov became one of the most prominent leaders of the opposition.
He had been working on a report that friends said would prove that there was Russian military aid to separatists fighting in east Ukraine, which the Kremlin has always denied.
Mr Nemtsov was attacked on the Moskvoretsky bridge across the Moskva river while walking home with his girlfriend, Ukrainian model Anna Duritskaya, after a late dinner on the edge of Red Square.
The area is heavily but discreetly policed by special forces troops from the Federal Protective Service who guard the President and the Kremlin. The headquarters of the Federal Security Service is also nearby.
At least six shots were fired at Mr Nemtsov from a Makarov pistol, hitting him in the back. He died almost instantly. In unverified closed circuit television footage of the scene, a snow plough blocks the scene of the shooting. The killer then runs to a getaway car that races away from the bridge.
No one has been arrested and Mr Milov said it was as if “they aren’t investigating at all”.
Ms Duritskaya was unharmed.
The Investigative Committee of Russia was considering several theories. The first was that Mr Nemtsov was a “sacrificial victim” whose death was planned to destabilise Russia. Others included a hit by Islamist extremists, or someone connected with Mr Nemtsov’s tangled personal life.
Opposition leaders and analysts dismissed those suggestions and said it was far more likely that Mr Nemtsov had been killed by a professional team linked to the security services or by rogue nationalists driven to murder by increasingly toxic state television.
Andrei Soldatov, a journalist who has written several books on the KGB, said the professionalism of the crime had surprised him and “makes the theory of a rogue ­element very thin to me”.

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