Closing summary
It’s after dark in Moscow and time for a closing summary.
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Large numbers of people have rallied in Moscow following the murder of the prominent opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead late on Friday. Police put numbers at 7,000, while those involved said the protest drew 50,000.
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There were similar if smaller protests in other Russian cities, including Ekaterinburg and St Petersburg.
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The US secretary of state, John Kerry, has called for a “thorough, transparent, real investigation” into the killing.
- The Ukrainian MP Alexei Goncharenko was arrested in connection with the protest. In a Facebook update he said he was held because of a T-short carrying a protest slogan.
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Marina Litvinenko, the widow of Alexander Litvinenko, has said the murder was “the full responsibility of [Vladimir Putin] and his government”.
This is a video of Boris Nemtsov’s last televised interview, given hours before being shot dead.
More on Alexei Goncharenko (see 13.59). AFP reports that the Ukrainian politician said he was detained by Russian police ahead of the Moscow march. He wrote on Fracebook:
Police have detained me. I did not shout anything, did not carry any banners or flags - they simply detained me over the T-shirt.
According to a picture posted on his Facebook page, Goncharenko’s T-shirt carried a picture of Boris Nemtsov and said in Ukrainian: “Heroes never die”.
John Kerry has been speaking about the Nemtsov murder. Talking to ABC’s This Week, the US secretary of state said his country wanted to see a “thorough, transparent, real investigation” into the killing.
Reuters quotes him as saying:
The bottom line is we hope there will be a thorough, transparent, real investigation, not just of who actually fired the shots but who if anyone may have ordered or instructed or been behind this.
Another photo from the Moscow march.
Another update from Shaun Walker:
Reports are coming in that Ukrainian MP Alexei Goncharenko has been arrested at the Moscow march. He may be accused as part of a criminal investigation into the events in Odessa on 2 May last year when when the building they were in was set on fire. Russia has called the events a deliberate massacre.
Updated
Shaun Walker sends the news that the investigative committee set up to look into Nemtsov’s death has offered a reward of 3 million roubles (about £31,500) for information about his killers.
Someone on the Moscow march holding a sign saying, “‘Je suis Boris Nemtsov”, a form of words also cropping up on Twitter.
As a sort of interim summary, here’s a few paragraphs from the latest Reuters story on the Moscow march:
Holding placards declaring “I am not afraid”, thousands of Russians marched in Moscow on Sunday in memory of Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov, whose murder has widened a split in society that some say could threaten Russia’s future.
Families, the old and young walked slowly, with many carrying portraits of Nemtsov, an opposition politician and former deputy prime minister who was shot dead while walking home from a restaurant in central Moscow on Friday night.
“If we can stop the campaign of hate that’s being directed at the opposition, then we have a chance to change Russia. If not then we face the prospect of mass civil conflict,” Gennady Gudkov, an opposition leader, told Reuters before the march.
“The authorities are corrupt and don’t allow any threats to them to emerge. Boris was uncomfortable for them.”
His murder has prompted deep soul searching in a country where for years after the Soviet Union collapsed many yearned for the stability later brought by President Vladimir Putin. Some now fear his rule has become an autocracy.
Putin has vowed to pursue those who killed Nemtsov, calling the murder a “provocation”.
National investigators who answer to the Russian leader say they are pursuing several lines of inquiry, including the possibility that Nemtsov, a Jew, was killed by radical Islamists or that the opposition killed him to blacken Putin’s name.
Putin’s opponents say such suggestions show the cynicism of Russia’s leaders as they whip up nationalism, hatred and anti-Western hysteria to rally support for his policies on Ukraine and deflect blame for an economic crisis.
“It is a blow to Russia. If political views are punished this way, then this country simply has no future,” Sergei Mitrokhin, an opposition leader, said of Nemtsov’s murder.
A photograph from the Ekaterinburg protests.
A first word on potential numbers at the Moscow rally, from Shaun Walker:
The police say around 7,000 people are at the rally, however official numbers in Russia often appear smaller than the reality. Former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, one of the leaders of the rally, says he believes there are at least 50,000 people present.
He also sends quotes form Kasyanov, speaking form the front of the march to Russia’s TV Rain:
I think this killing has exploded the minds of people, and forced people to rethink the reality in which we live. The tragic death of Boris should be a turning point in our society, for those people who are not indifferent to what is happening in our country, and this of course is mainly the middle class, who are the driving force of what happens in our country.
To start with they should rethink for themselves what is happening here, and then take their opinions to the rest of the country. I am certain that the situation will change iwhtin the next few months. Changes are inevitable.
Updated
And another update from Shaun Walker:
In a TV interview, Nemtsov’s friend and political partner, Ilya Yashin, says Nemtsov was told to get bodyguards on many occasions but rejected the idea, saying if people wanted to kill him, bodyguards would not help.
Two more photos from Moscow, of the march and of the police presence.
News of the Moscow march from Shaun Walker, who passed on this tweeted photo:
All those coming to the rally have to pass through metal detectors, and police are lining the route of the march. This is a photograph of a queue to get in.
Очередь на рамки pic.twitter.com/eKYnJt8w7G
— Грани.Ру (@GraniTweet) March 1, 2015
Marina Litvinenko, the widow of Alexander Litvinenko, who was killed in London by radiation poisoning allegedly administered by agents of the Russian state, has described the death of Nemtsov “absolutely devastating”.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House programme, she said she believed the shooting was linked to her husband’s poisoning:
It’s a different way to kill a person, but a way to present that anybody who will try to say something against us will be killed.
Litvinenko said critics of the Putin regime were being described as “enemies of Russia”. She said:
Particularly after the war with Ukraine, the atmosphere in Russia is very aggressive. When you see images saying he is an enemy of Russia, Russian people will hate him...
All what happened in Russia, it’s the responsibility of this government and Mr Putin, he built this country that became centre of huge conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and a big problem with all west, and it’s the full responsibility of this person and his government.
Her late husband’s death is currently the subject of a public inquiry at the high court in London.
Updated
The first photos of the Moscow protest are coming through.
Shaun Walker sends this:
A number of smaller rallies are being held in cities across Russia. in Voronezh, local activists report “anti-Maidan” guys showed up and threw green dye at the them.
There was an “anti-Maidan” rally in Moscow last month, a movement with apparent support from Russian authorities which aims to prevent a Ukraine-style anti-government uprising in Russia. On Ukraine, Shaun adds:
Ukraine president Poroshenko has claimed Nemtsov was about to prove Russian involvement in Ukraine and was killed because of that, although here people sceptical about that version - there was enough info in the public domain about Russian involvement already, the government just ignores it.
A Russian news website, Sputnik News, is carrying a video it says shows the killer or killers approaching Nemtsov on the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky bridge.
The grainy and long-distance CCTV footage unearthed by the pro-Kremlin website shows Nemtsov and the woman he was waling with on the bridge, it says. A snowplow catches up with them, and they are hidden from camera view. The story adds:
A moment later a man, possibly the killer, is seen running out from behind the snowplow and jumps into the waiting car. Just how he got on the bridge is hard to say though. It looks like the murder was carefully planned in advance.
My colleague Shaun Walker, who is also following the march, points me to this blog-based analysis by Russia expert Dr Mark Galeotti. Here’s a snippet:
My working hypothesis is that Nemtsov was killed by some murderous mavericks, not government agents, nor opposition fanatics. But the reason they felt obliged to go and gun down a frankly past-his-peak anti-government figure is highly likely to be precisely because of the increasingly toxic political climate that clearly is a product of Kremlin agency, in which people like Nemtsov are portrayed as Russophobic minions of the West, enemies of Russia’s people, culture, values and interests.
So, to loop things round, Putin is guilty, I suspect – and all the caveats about the lack of hard evidence yet – the same way that tobacco companies are considered guilty of cancer deaths after they may have known about the risks, or any hate-speaker may be when some unhinged acolytes take their sentiments and decide to turn them into bloody action.
Alec Luhn, who is among the many reporters with the march, tweets this photo of another of the marches taking place today, in Ekaterinburg.
Hundreds come out to remember Nemtsov at Yekaterinburg march @RFERL pic.twitter.com/DSMcg5EwVU
— Alec Luhn (@ASLuhn) March 1, 2015
Updated
For some fascinating background, here is a 1997 piece about Nemtsov by the BBC’s Angus Roxburgh, detailing the then-upcoming politician with a reputation for battling corruption and cronyism. As Roxburg says in the report:
The danger is, he may have peaked too early. His reforming zeal is bound to earn him enemies.
Thousands of people are expected to march through central Moscow to commemorate Boris Nemtsov, a high-profile and vocal critic of the rule of Vladimir Putin, who was shot dead near the Kremlin late on Friday.
The charismatic 55-year-old, who was Russia’s deputy prime minister under the rule of Boris Yeltsin, was killed with four bullets to his back on a bridge in the shadow of the Kremlin’s towers.
Opposition activists had been planned to march today anyway, but replaced this march with a protest at Nemtsov’s murder, to which the Kremlin granted permission.
Putin has promised to personally oversee the police investigation. However friends and supporters of the slain politician have expressed little faith in the inquiry, and believe Nemtsov was killed either directly because of his opposition to the Kremlin, or by shady nationalist forces reacting to a long propaganda campaign on state-controlled television calling the political opposition traitors.
Russia’s investigative committee has come up with a series of alternative theories, including that Nemtsov was a “sacrificial victim” for opponents of Putin, as a means to destabilise Russia, by Islamist militants, or by people worried about his personal life.
• Here’s our main news story ahead of the march, which begins imminently.
• This is today’s Observer editorial on the killing, and what it means for Russia.
