Inside The Murder Of Vladimir Putin's Political Opponent, Boris Nemtsov

One of the most eyebrow-raising aspects of Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime is that many people who have dared to present public opposition to his policies and authorities have wound up dead under suspicious circumstances. Of course, this hasn't been the case for every single person who has ever publicly opposed Putin, but it has happened on enough occasions that a pattern seems to have emerged.

According to Insider, one such instance was the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent, who died in 2006 after drinking poison-laced tea in a London hotel. Litvinenko was a known Putin critic, and an investigation by the British government indicated his death had been carried out by operatives working on orders from Putin and the head of the Russian FSB (a successor to the KGB) Nikolai Patrushev (via The New York Times).

According to The Washington Post, this drew criticism, including from Boris Berezovsky, an exiled tycoon living in the United Kingdom, who just like the British report, accused the Kremlin of involvement in Litvinenko's death. He was found dead under suspicious circumstances in his home, with officials unable to determine a cause of death. While the deaths of Litvinenko and Berezovsky raised suspicions due to their mysterious nature, another Putin opposer, Boris Nemtsov was gunned down in public, not far from the Kremlin.

Nemtsov didn't retreat. Even as Putin and company strengthened their grip on Russian politics, he remained in the picture. According to The Washington Post, Nemtsov was at first supportive of Putin, however, he started to withdraw that support as Putin made increasingly controversial decisions and repealed civil liberties post-Soviet reformers like Nemtsov had fought for.

By 2011, Nemtsov was one of Putin's most notable public critics. He was known to organize marches and write reports on the rampant government corruption, and that same year he was arrested for 15 days for his part in protests against the 2011 Russian election (via BBC News).

Nemtsov criticized Putin's government on several fronts. He alleged that there had been corruption during the planning phases of the 2014 Sochi WInter Olympics and pointed the finger at the Kremlin for Russia's worsening economic conditions. He also blamed Russia for the crisis in Ukraine, which in 2014 involved fighting between the Ukrainian government and Russian-supported separatists. Those same separatists were also responsible for shooting down a commercial airliner that killed 298 people, per Vox. Not long before his death, Nemtsov released a report that exposed the Russian government's involvement in Ukraine, something Putin had repeatedly denied (via U.S. Department of State).

In 2022 — seven years after Nemtsov was gunned down in Moscow — it was revealed that he had been followed multiple times by a government agent Valery Sukharev. According to leaked flight and train reservation data obtained by the BBC, Nemtsov was followed when he traveled as many as 13 times, including once on a trip just over a week before his death. The FSB keeps tabs on this kind of data using a program called Magistral, however, it only keeps tabs on people that the government wishes to monitor and the agents responsible for following them.

It was revealed that Sukharev has been tied to other assassination attempts including the poisonings of one of Nemtsov's close friends and colleagues, Vladimir Kara-Murza. Kara-Murza was poisoned twice, once in 2015 and again in 2017, but managed to survive them both. While Sukharev was not directly responsible for carrying out the assassinations, phone records indicate that he was in contact with members of the team who were, calling or texting them 145 times.

Sukharev was also linked to another poisoning, this time of Alexei Navalny, known for his anti-corruption videos. Navalny was poisoned using a nerve agent called Novichok, which was developed by the Soviet Union but is banned in most of the rest of the world. Navalny survived but is currently imprisoned. According to The Mirror, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Sukharev was reportedly spotted in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol which was taken under siege by the Russian forces.