Orders to Kill

by Amy Knight

  Anti-corruption crusader Aleksei Navalny was unable to attend the public funeral of his close friend Nemtsov on March 1, 2015 because he was under house arrest. In mid-February, he and Nemtsov had passed out leaflets together in the Moscow metro, inviting people to the scheduled opposition march against Russian aggression in Ukraine. Navalny, who had already been charged several times for demonstrating in public illegally, was arrested, while Nemtsov got off with a warning. One wonders whether the authorities’ decision not to detain Nemtsov, which they easily could have done, was part of a larger plan. Arresting such a prominent political figure as Nemtsov (he had earlier been detained for dissident activities) would have made him a cause célèbre and encouraged more people on the streets in protest against the Kremlin. Killing Nemtsov a little later was a better solution.

  Although Navalny was not always in agreement with Nemtsov on policy issues and strategy, the two worked together for the common cause of bringing about democracy in Russia, in the process forcing Putin out of office. As a goal, this may have seemed close to impossible, but it did not keep them from trying, despite the obvious dangers to both. Navalny, clearly shaken by the murder, shared the following thoughts for his Russian blog readers on March 1: “I believe that Nemtsov was killed by members of the government (intelligence) or a pro-government organization on orders from the political leadership of the country, including Vladimir Putin. It is only a question of how this order was formulated: ‘You must kill Nemtsov’ or ‘you must do a hugely sensational action.’ … This was not freelancing, but directly [the work of] Putin, Nikolai Patrushev, Sergei Ivanov [Putin’s chief of staff] [and] Aleksandr Bortnikov.…”21

  Navalny went on to discount the idea, spread by the Kremlin, that Putin could not have been connected with the murder because it painted him in a bad light. This theory, Navalny said, “goes into the same corner with ‘murderers who were not advantageous to Duvalier’ or ‘the Red Terror was not advantageous to Stalin.’ … It is advantageous to Putin. Open a history book, it is all written there.” Navalny also dismissed the idea, circulated immediately by the Kremlin, that there was no point in the government murdering Nemtsov because he was not important or influential: “Boris was one of the most problematic politicians for the Kremlin. He was one of a few who exposed the corruption of Putin and his close circle, citing concrete names.”22

  Navalny added that the only thing that could refute his claim of Kremlin involvement in Nemtsov’s murder would be the rapid solving of the case, with both the perpetrators and the contractors identified, and an open trial. However, it comes now as no surprise that, as in previous cases, the FSB, the MVD, and the Investigative Committee accomplished little more rounding up five suspects and coercing them by torture into confessing.

  The Kremlin Responds

  The day after the killing, Putin issued a formal order (published on his Russian website) to the three chiefs of his investigative agencies. The order said that they were to create a special body to solve the crime and personally oversee the case. But how were these men, all close allies of the president, to investigate a murder that may well have been ordered by him? They knew that Putin takes everything personally when it comes to his critics, and Boris Nemtsov was the most vociferous of them all. More important, would anyone dare kill such a prominent national figure as Nemtsov without the Russian president’s permission?

  In all probability, these security chiefs knew the secrets behind this shocking crime, but they nonetheless had to go through the motions of an investigation. Things did not go smoothly, however. The different agencies began to contradict each other—and themselves—as they spoke out about the investigation and provided leaks to various media outlets. (Indeed, the scenario that played out after the murder was almost laughable, if not for the tragic circumstances.)

  The first problem arose with the issue of camera surveillance. The FSO initially claimed, falsely, that it did not have jurisdiction over the eighteen cameras located on lampposts along the Moskvoretskii Bridge, because the bridge was under the authority of the City of Moscow. After city officials denied that this was the case, FSO officials allowed that in fact the cameras were theirs, but they had been under repair at the time of the murder. (In fact, the Moscow municipality did have television cameras on the bridge for monitoring the weather, but its images were not clear enough to show the killer or the car he escaped in.)23

  The day after the crime, LifeNews television (a Kremlin mouthpiece) produced a witness, one “Viktor M,” who was allegedly on the bridge and saw Nemtsov’s murder. The witness, whose face was disguised, gave the following information: the killer was a man with short, dark hair, five feet, seven inches tall, who escaped after the murder in a silver-colored VAZ-21102 with North Ossetia number plates. That was the last that was heard from Viktor M.24 Then, a month later, the Russian newspaper Kommersant, citing sources from the security agencies, claimed that a twenty-seven-year-old company manager by the name of Evgenii was also a witness. His last name was not given. According to the paper, Evgenii was walking behind Duritskaya and Nemtsov, wearing headphones and listening to loud “hard rock” music, and did not hear the gunshot. He was looking at his phone screen at the time of the shooting—Viktor M, coincidentally, had the same story—but did see the shooter afterward. He described the killer as a person of medium height, with long dark hair and the getaway car as a white Lada, not a VAZ.25

  Meanwhile, within just six days (a record for any high-profile murder), authorities had arrested five Chechens as suspects, including the alleged triggerman, Zaur Dadaev, who did not fit either of the physical descriptions given by the two supposed witnesses. A former member of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov’s crack “Sever” (North) fighting Battalion, Dadaev confessed to the killing but later recanted, claiming he had been tortured. Russian authorities said they were still looking for two other suspects: Ruslan Makhutdinov, another Sever member, who they alleged was the organizer of the murder, and Ruslan Geremeev, deputy commander of the Sever Battalion. Both were closely connected to Kadyrov.26

  All of these details, it seems, were designed to give the impression to the public that investigators were zealously following leads in trying to zero in on the criminals. In fact, it seemed more like a clumsy, half-hearted effort to cover up the fact that investigators knew from the beginning—indeed probably beforehand—who had committed the murder. As it later turned out, the five arrested Chechens were, in all probability, the perpetrators. But they were a sorry bunch. In November 2015, security officials leaked a curious report on the investigation to Kommersant.27 Investigators had located a Moscow apartment that the criminals had allegedly been using as a base since September 2014 for conducting extensive surveillance of Nemtsov. (No matter that the Chechens had supposedly been driven to kill Nemtsov because of his sympathetic comments about the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, which did not occur until December 2014.)

  Interestingly, Russian security authorities claimed to have found evidence of heroin and other drugs in the apartment used by the killers. (In fact, investigators had earlier reported that the accused killer, Dadaev, was first apprehended by the Russian Anti-Drug Agency, FSKN, on narcotic charges.) This claim was presumably an effort to show that the killers were not sophisticated professionals, hired by a highly placed contractor to carry out a politically motivated murder. But how would these drug-addicted Chechens, an ethnic group that is watched closely by authorities when they travel outside Chechnya, have gone unnoticed by the FSB or MVD for all these months? As noted, the FSB was, as a routine matter, conducting its own surveillance of Nemtsov. It is simply not possible that the FSB would have been unaware that these Chechens were also following him and that they were plotting his murder.

  Putin’s Disappearance

  Many commentators have said that Dadaev would not have undertaken such a bold assassination without Kadyrov’s explicit orders. But the chain of command still would have had to go higher than the Chechen president. Althoug
h Kadyrov runs Chechnya like a fiefdom, and has for years cracked down on his enemies with impunity, his powers have clear limits in the Russian capital. Akhmed Zakaev stressed to me that Kadyrov would never embark on a mission to kill such a prominent figure as Boris Nemtsov without Putin’s approval. Kadyrov, he said, “can do what he wants in Chechnya, but not in Moscow. It is most likely that Nemtsov was assassinated because it was Putin’s wish.”28 Nemtsov’s colleague Vladimir Milov concurred: “Although Kadyrov might not know some things and did not attend university, he is perfectly aware that the decision regarding the life of Boris Nemtsov lies in ‘Daddy’s’ [Putin’s] domain. By doing anything to Nemtsov [on his own], Kadyrov would be crossing a red line and entering the territory under Daddy’s jurisdiction.”29

  On March 9, just two days after the arrests of Dadaev and the other four Chechens were made public, the Kremlin, astonishingly, announced that Putin had awarded Kadyrov a medal of honor for his service to the Russian state. And, as previously noted, a medal was awarded at the same time to Lugovoy, the main suspect in the Litvinenko murder. The strange timing of the awards was dismissed by presidential spokesman Dmitrii Peskov as “just a coincidence.” But in the meantime, Putin had vanished from public view with no explanation, so it is possible that someone highly placed in the Kremlin used this announcement to try to discredit Putin by associating him with the murders of Litvinenko and Nemtsov. Or that Putin did sanction the awards, as a defiant signal that he would let neither Lugovoy or Kadyrov face reprisals. Putin’s unprecedented ten-day disappearance, from March 6 to March 16, gave rise to intense media speculation: Was he gravely ill? Had he been ousted from the Kremlin by his colleagues?30

  When he finally re-emerged, Putin made light of his absence, saying “life would be boring without gossip.” But there is good reason to believe that his disappearance was connected to the Nemtsov murder. Close observers of the Kremlin surmised that some of his security officials, most probably from the FSB, thought Putin had gone too far in having Nemtsov shot so close to the Kremlin and in using Kadyrov to carry out the job. Bortnikov’s FSB had reportedly long objected to Kadyrov’s reckless use of extrajudicial killings to go after his Chechen enemies in his own republic and abroad. The siloviki elite includes such powerful figures as Patrushev, Igor Sechin, and Aleksandr Bastrykin. Some members of this group may also have voiced dissent, causing Putin, in keeping with a long-lived Kremlin tradition during power struggles, to disappear from the scene.

  As Russian political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky noted: “For the first time in his fifteen-year-long rule, Putin has run into a really serious problem: a virtually open conflict between the two pillars of his power, the federal security establishment and Ramzan Kadyrov.” Belkovsky observed that Putin’s power depends on his good relations with the security services, since they are responsible for carrying out his most important policies as well as ensuring his personal security. On the other hand, he is also dependent on the support of Kadyrov, who has kept a lid on the restive North Caucasus. Belkovsky concluded that Putin opted to lay low until the situation resolved itself.31

  In the end, Putin weathered the storm, apparently unscathed. This can be explained by the fact that Putin’s men in the Kremlin, whether from the security elite or not, have a huge stake in keeping him in power. By “laying low” for ten days, Putin demonstrated to them how essential he is for their survival. Putin’s allies, who have benefited financially from government corruption and have carried out his repressive measures at home and abroad, would surely fall with him if he lost his hold on power and disappeared from public life.

  Challenges to the Kremlin’s Version

  In response to their requests to investigative authorities for answers to their many questions about the Nemtsov murder case, Milov and members of Nemtsov’s family have been met with obstruction. Nemtsov’s daughter Zhanna, who has left Russia and now lives in Germany (she is a journalist for Deutsche Welle) because she fears for her own safety, said that she doubts the facts of her father’s murder will ever come to light: “Russia—it’s a country of secrets. Everything is secret in Russia.”32

  In October 2015, Dmitrii Gudkov, the lone liberal deputy to the Russian Duma (who lost his seat after the September 2016 parliamentary elections), sent a complaint on behalf of the lawyer for the Nemtsov family, Vadim Prokhorov, to the President’s Administration. Gudkov wanted an explanation as to why the FSO had not provided surveillance videos from the cameras on the Bol’shoi Moskvoretskii Bridge the night of Nemtsov’s murder to the Investigative Committee. In his complaint, Gudov noted that the bridge “is a key transportation hub in the immediate vicinity of the Kremlin, to which the FSO, in carrying out its duties, must give special attention, including 24-hour camera surveillance. The absence of video surveillance on the bridge [that night] means there are serious inadequacies in the protection of the president and other key [government] structures.”33

  Gudkov was told to address his complaint directly to the FSO, which responded to him a couple of weeks later. According to a FSO press officer, it was indeed the case that the FSO did not have CCTV cameras monitoring the bridge. Their cameras were directed toward the inside of the Kremlin wall. Gudkov was incredulous, noting on his Facebook page that this meant “any terrorist can come right under the Kremlin wall.”34

  In the meantime, Zhanna Nemtsova filed a complaint with a Moscow City Court requesting that investigators question Ramzan Kadyrov and three of his close supporters from Chechnya, all of whom were widely thought to have been involved in the murder. Nemtsova was strongly discouraged from making this request by none other than Anatoly Chubais, Nemtsov’s former Kremlin colleague, currently the chairman of the technology corporation Rosnano. He also suggested that she fire her lawyer, presumably for giving her bad advice. Chubais, who posted an email exchange with Nemtsova on Facebook on September 1, 2015, is still a Kremlin insider, so he presumably had heard that Kadyrov would be kept out of the case.35 In October, after a hearing, Nemtsova’s request was denied.

  Events in the Case Unfold

  By July 2016, Russian prosecutors had completed their case against five Chechens, and a Moscow District military court began preliminary hearings and jury selection. (The case was assigned to a military court because one defendant was a member of the Sever Battalion, which belongs to the Internal Troops.) The accused were as follows: Zaur Dadaev, the brothers Anzor and Shadid Gubashev, Tamerlan Eskerkhanov, and Khamzat Bakhaev. According to the indictment by Russian prosecutors, in September 2014 this group of Chechens reached an agreement with one Ruslan Mukhudinov (and other unnamed persons) to kill Nemtsov for a reward of fifteen million rubles (roughly $275,000). Mukhudinov, the alleged mastermind, is still at large and is on the wanted list of Interpol. He is reportedly in the United Arab Emirates.36

  The indictment charges that the group conducted intensive surveillance of Nemtsov in the following months, while obtaining weapons and devising a plan of attack. On the evening of the murder, Dadaev, Anzor Gubashev, and one Beslan Shavanov (who allegedly blew himself up while being captured by police) followed Nemtsov. Dadaev alone climbed the steps to the bridge and on a signal from the other two fired six shots at Nemtsov from behind. Mukhudinov drove the getaway car. The group fled to Ingushetia in the following days and were then, with the exception of Mukhudinov and Shavanov, apprehended by the police. Mukhudinov’s motives for organizing the murder remain unclear, and the source of his fifteen million rubles has not been established.

  Nemtsov’s family members and their attorneys filed a complaint with the Investigative Committee demanding that Putin’s former chief bodyguard Viktor Zolotov, head of the Internal Troops at the time of the murder, be questioned in the case. Two of the alleged killers, Dadaev and Shavanov, as members of the Sever Battalion, were subordinate to him. The complaint noted that in August 2015, Zolotov paid a personal visit to Kadyrov, who considered the Sever battalion to be his private army. The family’s lawyers were able to obtain an important d
ocument, a January 2016 memorandum sent by a senior investigator in the case, Maj. Gen. N. B. Tutevich, to Zolotov, noting that Dadaev had been on active duty in Moscow at the time of the killing. (In contradiction to this, prosecutors had claimed that Dadaev had resigned from the Internal Troops at that point.) The memorandum also stated that, after the murder, Dadaev hid in the Moscow apartment rented by the commander of the Sever battalion, Ruslan Geremeev, who had been assigned to Moscow with a personal weapon. In the memorandum, Tutevich made reference to a possible “intent to distort reality with the purpose of covering up the involvement of Dadaev in the murder of Nemtsov” and requested that Zolotov conduct an internal probe and discipline those who were guilty.37

  It might be added that Geremeev, who was initially a suspect, was relegated to the status of witness in the case after questioning by investigators, despite the fact that Mukhudinov was his personal driver and that Geremeev rented the Moscow apartment where some of the defendants hung out. By all accounts, Geremeev is a member of Kadyrov’s inner circle and therefore was protected from prosecution in the Nemtsov murder. He is a close relative of some of the most senior people in Chechnya, including Russian Duma deputy Adam Delimkhanov, his cousin, and Suleiman Geremeev, a senator and member of the upper house of the Russian parliament, who is his uncle. According to Nemtsov family lawyer Prokhorov, senior investigator Tutevich prepared an indictment against Ruslan Geremeev, but it was struck down by Bastrykin. As for Geremeev’s whereabouts, Prokhorov said: “I think he is in Chechnya, someone else claims he is in the Emirates.”38

  Quite clearly the Kremlin would like the Nemtsov case to recede into the background. When the jury trial finally began in Moscow on October 3, 2016, a lawyer for the prosecution, Olga Mikhailova, noted that the investigation had been hampered by the fact that Kadyrov had not been available for questioning and that the footage of surveillance cameras at the time of the murder was missing. Also, two of the defendants, Dadaev and Gubashev, claimed that they had been coerced into giving a false confession. All of the five defendants have proclaimed their innocence.