The State Department on Monday honored a longtime critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin who was assassinated two years ago today.
U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Tefft visited the spot in Moscow where the Russian opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, was murdered near the Kremlin. He visited one day after thousands of Russians marched to the scene of the murder to call for “a real democratic state” and the prosecution of those responsible for Nemtsov’s murder.
“Though Boris Nemtsov is gone, his spirit lives on in Russians young and old who seek to build a more democratic and prosperous society,” State Department acting spokesperson Mark Toner said in a Monday statement. “We call once more on the Russian government to ensure that those responsible for Boris Nemtsov’s killing are brought to justice.”
Nemtsov was researching a report that accused Putin of instigating the war in Ukraine to boost his domestic approval rating. “Putin means crisis, Putin means war,” he told Financial Times days before his murder. Russian officials have arrested five Chechens in connection with the murder.
“One of the suspected killers, [Zaur] Dadaev, reportedly told investigators last year that the murder had been carried out in revenge for Nemtsov making ‘negative comments on Muslims and Islam’ and publicly condemning the Islamists who killed journalists working for Charlie Hebdo magazine in France in January of 2015,” according to RT, a Kremlin-run media outlet.
Russian police provided security for the Nemtsov march on Sunday, but “law enforcement officers also confiscated some posters that referred to Putin by name,” according to The Guardian.
The Chechen suspects have pleaded not guilty and Nemtsov’s allies believe he was murdered over his denunciations of the war in Ukraine. “One of his alleged assassins is a former officer in the service of Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen president, whose soldiers fought on the side of the separatists in Ukraine,” according to the Economist.
Chechnya looms large in the story of Putin’s leadership of Russia. The region declared independence in 1994 and signed a peace treaty with then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin in 1996 after repelling Russian forces. Putin, then a new prime minister and former head of the Russian security service FSB, devastated the region in a 1999 military offensive. Those attacks followed a bombing in Moscow that killed hundreds of people and was blamed on Chechen separatists, although U.S. leaders suspect Putin’s team orchestrated the attack.
“Putin’s approval rating before the attacks against the Chechens was at 31 percent; by mid-August of that year, it was at 78 percent in just three months,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said during Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s confirmation hearing in January.
Nemtsov’s report on the Ukraine conflict, which was completed and published posthumously by his assistants, alleged that Putin planned the annexation of Crimea and war in eastern Ukraine in order to boost his approval ratings, which had fallen to a politically-dangerous point.
“The annexation of Crimea to Russia with the active support of state propaganda enabled Putin to strengthen radically his own legitimacy,” the Nemtsov report said, according to an English translation from the Free Russia Foundation. “His popularity rating reached record levels.”
The State Department’s salute of Nemtsov might annoy the Kremlin, but it could also reassure Rubio and other lawmakers who were frustrated that Tillerson declined to call Putin “a war criminal” during his confirmation hearing.
“[Refusal to condemn human rights abuses] demoralizes these people all over the world and it leads people to conclude this — which is damaging and it hurt us during the Cold War — and that is this: America cares about democracy and freedom, as long as it’s not being violated by someone that they need for something else,” Rubio told Tillerson during the hearing. “That cannot be who we are in the 21st century. We need a secretary of state that will fight for these principles.”
