The February 2015 Assassination of Boris Nemtsov and the Flawed Trial of His Alleged Killers ― An Exploration of Russia rime of the 21st Century

John B. Dunlop provides a detailed description of “the Russian crime of the twenty-first century” as well as a thorough examination of the eighty sessions of the nine-month-long trial (during 2016-2017) of Boris Nemtsov’s alleged killers. He directs attention to the chief obstacle in determining what precisely happened shortly before midnight on February 27, 2015, on a bridge located a mere stone’s throw from the Kremlin, in an area under the active surveillance of the Russian Federal Protective Service. The glaring absence of closed circuit videos from this most heavily guarded site in Russia is underscored. Given the absence of such key evidence, those seeking to investigate the murder have been akin to blind people stumbling about in obscurity.

The attempts to penetrate this man-made fog undertaken during the course of the trial by the Nemtsov family attorneys, Vadim Prokhorov and Olga Mikhailova, as well as by numerous tenacious analysts of the crime, such as former deputy Russian energy minister Vladimir Milov, former Russian presidential economics advisor Andrei Illarionov, and leading mathematician Andrei Piontkovskii, are covered in full. The uneven case mounted by the prosecution and the scrappy defense effort of the attorneys of the alleged killers, all of them ethnic Chechens, are highlighted, as well as the non-unanimous verdict which was reached by the twelve jurors. The findings of Dunlop’s study are in agreement with the Nemtsov family attorneys and with a number of other commentators who contend that the actual organizers of the crime remain at large as does the assassination’s shadowy mastermind.

John B. Dunlop is senior fellow emeritus at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. Among his books are The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism (1983), The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (1993), Russia Confronts Chechnya (1998), The 2002 Dubrovka and 2004 Beslan Hostage Crises (2006), and The Moscow Bombings of September 1999 (2012).

Vladimir Kara-Murza is chairman of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom.