Activists and friends of slain Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov will release a report on Russian soldiers secretly fighting in Ukraine that Nemtsov was working on before he was gunned down in front of the Kremlin in February.
Ilya Yashin, a close friend of Nemtsov and a high-ranking member of his RPR-Parnas party, plans to publish the finished report, called Putin. War, in Moscow on Tuesday. Yashin recently said that Nemtsov had hoped that “opening society’s eyes to the crime” of Russian soldiers fighting on the side of separatists in eastern Ukraine would help stop the war. Low-level fighting has continued in the region despite a February ceasefire.
Although a growing body of evidence, including interviews with Russian soldiers, indicates that Moscow has sent active-duty troops and equipment to support the pro-Russia rebels over the past year, the president, Vladimir Putin, continues to deny his forces’ participation in the conflict. Secret funerals have been held in Russia for soldiers killed in eastern Ukraine and relatives of those who fought there have complained of not receiving compensation which is normally given to veterans of official conflicts.
Yashin and other volunteers including regional politician Lev Shlossberg and war correspondent Ilya Barabanov were able to continue work on the report even though investigators reportedly confiscated documents and computers from Nemtsov’s office and home after he was murdered.
Shortly before he was killed, Nemtsov reportedly scrawled a note reading: “Some paratroopers from Ivanovo have got in touch with me. 17 killed, they didn’t give them their money, but for now they are frightened to talk.”
Yashin went to Ivanovo and spoke with soldiers’ families who had contacted Nemtsov, but he said they had been frightened into silence and would not go on record. Instead, the report will probably rely heavily on open sources, as Nemtsov’s past reports on state corruption did.
Yashin and other activists have reportedly printed 3,000 copies of the report, which will also be available online, and plan to raise money for a larger print run. Raising awareness will be a challenge, however. State media did not cover Nemtsov’s previous reports, including one detailing corruption in the preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. A recent poll found that 64% of respondents had not heard of the publications.
A security forces officer from Russia’s Chechnya region and four other men have been charged in connection with shooting Nemtsov on the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge near the Kremlin on 27 February, but investigators have failed to get those behind what is widely believed to be a contract killing.
