The murder of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov on Feb. 27, 2015, has never been fully solved. A Chechen man was convicted of pulling the trigger when Nemtsov was shot four times near the Kremlin wall. But who ordered the killing, and their motive, remains unknown. An investigation by the open-source outlet Bellingcat raises new questions that demand answers.
Nemtsov was among the earliest of the young reformers to rise to prominence after the Soviet collapse. A physicist, he turned the Nizhny Novgorod region into a laboratory for nascent capitalism and later served as a deputy prime minister under President Boris Yeltsin. After Vladimir Putin came to power in the Kremlin, Nemtsov was a leading voice of the political opposition. He decried corruption under Mr. Putin. In 2012, Nemtsov published a report that Mr. Putin had 20 palaces, villas and residences at his disposal. In 2013, Nemtsov came out with a highly critical report claiming billions had been stolen from funds allocated for the Sochi Olympics.
Zaur Dadayev, a former Chechen security officer, was convicted of Nemtsov’s murder by a Russian military court. He acknowledged he and five other Chechens had tailed Nemtsov for months but claimed they did not commit the murder. Now, Bellingcat reports, along with the Insider and the BBC, that Nemtsov was surveilled for 10 months before his assassination by officers of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, a successor to the KGB.
An FSB unit followed Nemtsov on all his trips to Russian regions between May 2014 and February 2015, Bellingcat reports. The unit usually arrived hours or a day before Nemtsov and left shortly before or after him. In one case, when Nemtsov made a plane reservation for Novosibirsk at 12:10 a.m. on July 2, 2014, a pair of FSB officers booked the same flight 10 minutes later. Nemtsov went there to make a report on corruption in Gazprom, the state-owned Russian natural gas company. The FSB officers flew there and back on the same days as Nemtsov, although it is not known what they did. Valery Sukharev, one of the officers, “appears to be the seniormost FSB officer involved with tracking Russian opposition figures who have subsequently been poisoned or been taken mysteriously ill with poison-like symptoms in recent years,” Bellingcat reported. The victims include Alexei Navalny, who was poisoned in August 2020; Vladimir Kara-Murza, a protege of Nemtsov and a Post contributor, who suffered two poisoning attempts on his life in 2015 and 2017; and Dmitry Bykov, a writer, poet and Putin critic, who was apparently poisoned in 2019.
The Bellingcat report raises a number of questions: Why was the FSB following Nemtsov? The last surveillance was on Feb. 17, 2015. Ten days later, he was killed. Did the FSB know of the Chechens who were stalking Nemtsov? Did the Chechens work with the FSB? Why is it that so many of Mr. Putin’s critics wind up being killed? Who issued the orders?