Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister of Russia under Boris Yeltsin, was shot dead on the streets of Moscow Friday night.
Press reports say he was shot at least four times from a passing car while crossing a bridge in central Moscow, near the Kremlin. As many as seven shots may have been fired.
Nemtsov is a long-time opposition figure and was jailed several times for opposing Vladimir Putin. He told CNN's Anthony Bourdain that he feared Putin would have him killed.
No arrests have been reported.
Putin has closed down most opposition organs and put most of the opposition in jail – the ones, that is, who didn’t mysteriously die. The oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovskiy, for example, spent ten years in prison for opposing Putin, and lost his money in the process.
Among the dead are the journalists Anna Politkovskaya, Stanislav Markelov, a lawyer who had investigated many of the abuses documented by Politkovskaya, Journalist Anastasia Baburova, who was shot along with Markelov, Natalia Estemirova, who worked with Politkovskaya. The journalists Georgy Gongadze was killed in Ukraine in 2000 and Paul Klebnikov in Moscow in 2004.
Nemtsov, the former deputy prime minister, is the latest. He was the principal organizer of a large opposition demonstration expected to take place this Sunday.
Politkovskaya wrote in 2006 that: We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available (but is now being controlled, too).
For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial—whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.”
She survived several assassination attempts but was eventually killed in the stairwell of her of her apartment building – and, so nobody missed the significance – on Putin’s birthday.
Other suspicious events have been tied to Putin. One of the first things that happened after Putin became head of the FSB (formerly KGB), was the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB colleague, who had alleged corruption and malfeasance in the ranks of the F.S.B.
Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB agent, is wanted for questioning by British authorities in his poisoning death with radioactive polonium-210 in London. He was subsequently elected to the Russian parliament
That’s not an isolated incident. A court in Qatar convicted two Russian agents in 2004 of murdering the former president of Chechnya, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev with a car bomb in Doha.
The evidence is also overwhelming that Putin’s FSB was behind the explosions in 1999 that were used to declare war on Chechens. Two of the bombs went off in working class apartment buildings, killing hundreds of people. The group setting a third bomb was detected and arrested by local police in Ryazan, 100 miles south of Moscow, before the bomb detonated. They had FSB license plates and showed FSB IDs and so were released. FSB HQ later claimed the event was a training exercise, even though the detonator – which was left behind when the FSB confiscated the bomb – was a live one and similar to what had been used in Moscow. (See "Putin's Way," PBS Frontline)