Breaking: (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said on Saturday Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was murdered because he planned to disclose evidence of Russia’s involvement in Ukraine’s separatist conflict.
Poroshenko paid tribute to Nemtsov, who was shot dead late on Friday, and said the fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin had told him a couple of weeks ago that he had proof of Russia’s role in the Ukraine crisis and would reveal it.
“He said he would reveal persuasive evidence of the involvement of Russian armed forces in Ukraine. Someone was very afraid of this … They killed him,” Poroshenko said in televised comments during a visit to the city of Vinnytsia.
More than 5,600 people have been killed since pro-Russian separatists rebelled in east Ukraine last April, after the ousting of a Moscow-backed president in Kiev and Russia’s annexation of the Crimea peninsula.
Kiev and its Western allies say the rebels are funded and armed by Moscow, and backed by Russian military units. Moscow denies aiding sympathizers in Ukraine, and says heavily armed Russian-speaking troops operating without insignia there are not its men.
And there is more as noted below.
Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov said he feared Vladimir Putin would have him killed just days before he was gunned down in front of his Ukrainian model girlfriend.
The former deputy Prime Minister, 55, and fierce critic of the Russian leader said ‘I’m afraid Putin will kill me’ in an interview shortly before he was killed in a ‘politically motivated’ attack.
Nemtsov, a married father-of-four, was shot four times by assailants in a white car as he walked across a bridge in central Moscow with Anna Duritskaya on Friday night, but the model was unhurt.
Just hours before his death he accused Putin of pushing Russia into a crisis through his ‘mad, aggressive and deadly policy of war against Ukraine’ and was due to attend an protest on Sunday.
Nemtsov had been working on a report presenting evidence he believed proved Russia’s direct involvement in the separatist rebellion that erupted in eastern Ukraine last year, For a full background of events leading up to the hit job, click here.
In part from Foreign Policy: Given these recent events, most Russian opposition leaders have given up hoping that Obama will be able to change much inside Russia. Opposition activist Boris Nemtsov met with Obama in Moscow back in 2009, but this time around he didn’t see any point to a meeting with the U.S. president.
“Obama is a Hollywood actor, a weak man with no balls,” Nemtsov said, cutting to the point. “Nobody should ever expect him to help Russians seeking civil freedom.”
While Nemtsov initially backed Putin’s presidential run, calling him “responsible and honest”, he swiftly changed his mind and became one of his bitterest foes.
He was one of the founders of Russia’s Union of Right Forces liberal party, and its leader in the early 2000s, serving as an opposition lawmaker in the parliament where he criticised Putin’s initial steps to curb political freedoms.
Always tanned and flashing smiles, Nemtsov had a quasi rock-star image, wearing designer jeans and often wearing his shirt with an extra button open. He was known for his colourful love life and popularity with women.
Along with other opposition leaders, Nemtsov unsuccessfully sued Putin after he said Nemtsov and others “wreaked havoc” in Russia during the 1990s, pillaging it of billions of dollars.
Hate figure for pro-Kremlin groups
With the Kremlin’s rhetoric focused on discrediting the political climate of the 1990s, Nemtsov became one of the most reviled faces among the opposition and pro-Kremlin groups routinely put him on their lists of “traitors” in recent years.
He had been a victim of hacking and wiretapping, and pro-Kremlin websites had written reports about his personal life and alleged affairs.
A physicist by education, Nemtsov worked in a research institute in the late Soviet era as a young man and was among a wave of academics and scientists to be swept up by the political upheaval of the perestroika reform movement, becoming a deputy in Russia’s first post-Soviet lawmaking body.
Like most others in the opposition, Nemtsov was a prolific user of social networks, calling on Muscovites to attend an opposition rally on Sunday in his most recent blog entry.
In recent years he compiled a series of pamphlets exposing corruption under Putin, zooming in on the gas behemoth Gazprom, the residences allegedly owned by Putin, and most recently the misappropriations and graft during preparations for Russia’s Olympic Games in Sochi last year.
Though he continued to be a key figure in opposition events in Moscow, Nemtsov gradually withdrew over the past decade as a younger generation of opposition leaders such as charismatic lawyer Alexei Navalny appeared.
His most recent post was as a regional lawmaker in the city of Yaroslavl north of the capital.
