MOSCOW — At least 20,000 people marched through central Moscow on Sunday to pay respects to Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov, whose shooting death Friday night near Red Square shocked Russia’s beleaguered opposition and the democratic world.
Nemtsov had helped organize the march as a protest against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s policies in Ukraine. After the opposition leader’s death late Friday, the event was recast as a mourning ritual for one of the last politicians willing to fearlessly denounce the country’s increasingly autocratic leadership.
Carrying flowers, Russia’s tricolor flag and portraits of the slain 55-year-old Nemtsov, who was first deputy prime minister in the 1990s, the mourners chanted: “We’ll not forget. We’ll not forgive.” They carried a banner reading, “These bullets are for all of us!”
As the marchers approached the domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, a Moscow landmark, they chanted: “Putin is a murderer,” “Putin should go to jail,” and “Russia without Putin!”
Nemtsov in recent months had often traveled to Ukraine, reportedly to gather evidence of Kremlin involvement in the Ukraine war. Putin has denied that Russian arms or troops are being funneled to the separatists occupying two large regions of eastern Ukraine, but NATO satellite imagery and captured Russian soldiers have undermined those claims.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Nemtsov’s fellow opposition party leader, Ilya Yashin, said Nemtsov was about to publish a report presenting evidence of Russia’s military involvement in the conflict.
Nemtsov was walking home from a late dinner with a Ukrainian friend when he was gunned down just before midnight Friday as he walked onto the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge across the Moscow River from the Kremlin embankment.
Six shots were fired from a Soviet-made Makarov handgun, four of them striking Nemtsov in the head and torso.
Russia’s Sputnik news agency reported Sunday that authorities are looking for a man of average height with short hair. Security cameras in the area of the killing reportedly picked up images of the shooter, said to have been wearing jeans and a brown sweater.
The Russian Investigative Committee, one of the federal agencies Putin has deployed to find and punish the killers, has advanced several theories about the crime, which bore the hallmarks of a contract killing. These include such suspects as Muslim extremists and foreign interests set on destabilizing Russia. They make no mention of the possibility of Kremlin involvement.
As the committee offered a reward of just under $50,000 for information shedding light on the killing, Moscow’s TVC television station ran street camera images said to show the killer running out from behind a parked snow-removal truck to confront Nemtsov on the bridge sidewalk. There was no snow on the bridge Friday night, raising questions about why a snow plow would have been there.
The security video appeared to show the gunman being picked up by a passing car after shooting Nemtsov. The friend accompanying Nemtsov, who has been identified by media in Kiev as 23-year-old Ukrainian model Anna Duritskaya, was being questioned by investigators, according to a statement posted Sunday on the Investigative Committee’s official website.
Nemtsov was a leader of an opposition coalition and was instrumental in organizing protests against Putin during the latter’s presidential campaign three years ago. He was also the author of an expose on corruption surrounding Russia’s hosting of the Winter Olympic Games last year.
Sunday’s proceeded peacefully. Police generally kept a low profile, although two police helicopters hovered overhead and three police boats patrolled nearby in the Moscow River.
The number of people willing to publicly show defiance proves that the Kremlin has failed to instill universal fear, said Georgy Satarov, who was an adviser to President Boris Yeltsin and an associate of Nemtsov.
“When the ranks of the protesters eventually swell to over 300,000, they may start dictating their demands to the Kremlin,” said Satarov, president of the INDEM think tank in Moscow.
Pro-Kremlin analyst Dmitry Orlov, however, ruled out a scenario akin to Ukraine’s violent Maidan uprising last year, which drove Kremlin-allied President Viktor Yanukovich to flee the country.
“The peaceful nature of the march today demonstrated that the Russian opposition, in contrast to their Ukrainian colleagues, are much more balanced and reasonable,” said Orlov, head of the Agency for Political and Economic Communication. “Of course, there are forces who want to destabilize the situation in the country, but they are not influential and don’t enjoy support among the public at large.”
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