Thread by @jaketapper

This is Boris Nemtsov, born in Sochi in 1959, educated as a physicist. In the late 80s, before the collapse of the USSR, he became politically active protesting plans to destroy historical landmarks in Gorky, and - after the Chernobyl disaster - to protest a nuclear power plant.

2/ There was a time of hope in Russia, when young brilliant scholars such as Nemtsov, who supported economic and democratic reforms, seemed the future of Russia. He rose through the ranks and some saw him as a possible successor to Yeltsin.

Putin came next instead.

3/ Nemtsov's political career had ups and downs. Negotiating the early Putin era was fraught with risk. Soon enough, it became clear Nemtsov could not work with Putin to improve democracy in Russia. In 2007 he was arrested at an anti-Putin protest.

nytimes.com/2007/11/25/wor…

4/ In 2008 Nemtsov and @Kasparov63 founded the Russian liberal democratic political party Solidarnost.

In 2010, they were among the original signatories of the online "Putin Must Go" campaign.

5/ "We declare that no essential reforms can be carried out in Russia today as long as Putin controls real power in the country...

"Ridding ourselves of Putinism is the first, obligatory step on the path to a new, free Russia."

rferl.org/a/The_AntiPuti…

6/ His activism for the right of free assembly -- which Putin had been restricting -- landed him in jail in 2011.

web.archive.org/web/2011010609…

7/ Nemtsov criticized the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea. Later that year, he said the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 "in the skies above Donetsk is a terroristic act of the 9/11 scale."

charter97.org/en/news/2014/7…

8/ He wrote an oped in the Kyiv Post of the war in Ukraine: "This is not our war, this is not your war, this is not the war of 20-year old paratroopers sent out there. This is Vladimir Putin’s war."

kyivpost.com/article/opinio…

9/ In February 2015, Nemtsov was "working on a particularly incendiary report that he planned to call 'Putin and Ukraine,' which would trace the stream of weaponry flowing from Russia to separatists in the Donbass," @juliaioffe reported.

nytimes.com/2015/02/28/mag…

10/ That same month Nemtsov told a local interviewer that his mother worried for him. She would say: “When are you going to stop scolding Putin? He will kill you!"

sobesednik.ru/politika/20150…

11/ 6 years ago today, hours after applying for a permit for a protest against the war in Ukraine, Nemtsov, 55, was crossing the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow, with its gorgeous view of St Basil's Cathedral and the Kremlin. He was shot in the back and died at the scene.