A police officer takes a picture of the Nemtsov Bridge memorial on Thursday morning. Photo: SOTAvision
Despite a heavy police presence, supporters of the late Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov have been laying flowers on the bridge where he was shot on the 10th anniversary of his death, independent news outlet RusNews reported on Thursday.
An outspoken critic of the annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbas, and the Kremlin’s increasingly repressive policies, Nemtsov was shot dead late on 27 February 2015 while walking across the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, just outside the Kremlin. The bridge, which has since become informally known as Nemtsov Bridge, is now the site of a makeshift memorial that has been maintained by volunteers despite years of official harassment and intimidation.
Five Chechen men were sentenced in 2017 to between 11 and 20 years in prison for planning and carrying out Nemtsov’s assassination, though at least one of them was granted early release last year to fight in Ukraine. The person who ordered the hit on Nemtsov has never been brought to justice.
Several police officers were on the bridge on Thursday, warning mourners against stopping at the memorial, RusNews reported. Plainclothes police officers reportedly filmed everyone who came to lay flowers at the memorial, and three people were detained for “disrupting public order”, the outlet added, two of whom were journalists for RusNews.
The US, French, Italian and German ambassadors to Moscow all paid tribute by laying flowers at the memorial to Nemtsov on Thursday morning, RusNews wrote, adding that their bouquets were removed just a few hours later.
In a tribute published on Thursday, Nemtsov’s longtime ally and exiled Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin called him “the voice of anti-war and democratic resistance”, adding that there was no doubt Nemtsov had been killed on the orders of Vladimir Putin.
Exiled Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza wrote on X that “Nemtsov could not be bought. He could not be intimidated. He could not be forced to leave. That is why he was killed. Late at night, on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, with five bullets in the back.”
“It’s hard not to think what our world would be like if its largest country had not been led by a Chekist dreaming of the former ‘greatness’ of the Soviet empire, but by a man whose main and abiding goal, in his own words, was ‘to live in a free, European, democratic Russia’”, Kara-Murza continued.
“I often look at the signed books Nemtsov gave me during the years of our friendship and our work together. One of them says: ‘I’m sure we’ll make it’. I still want to believe that,” Kara-Murza concluded.