Thread by @Yaolri

THREAD

Who killed Russian politician Boris Nemtsov?

Last Monday — as Will Smith slapped Chris Rock — @bellingcat, @the_ins_ru & us at #BBCEyeInvestigations released an investigation that uncovered new important evidence.

This thread tells you what we found...

#NemtsovsShadow

In the evening of February 27th, 2015, Boris Nemtsov — a fierce critic of Putin — was shot dead on a bridge in the shadow of the Kremlin.

Five Chechens were jailed for the murder, but the key questions of who hired them for that and why remained unanswered.

Who was Boris Nemtsov?

He burst onto the scene in the 1990s and seemed to embody the hope — shared by millions of Russians — that a prosperous and democratic country might emerge from the collapse of the Soviet Union.

By 1997, still in his thirties, he was Deputy Prime Minister.

Some believed he would one day be Russia’s President.

Instead, the country took a different course.

Pushed to the margins of Russian politics, Nemtsov became the most vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, denouncing corruption and condemning Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Two days before he was due to lead another anti-war rally, Nemtsov was shot four times in the back.

He died at the scene.

For many Russians, Nemtsov’s killing was a shock.

Olga Shorina, his friend and colleague, remembers how she felt 🔊

As Russia mourned, Putin vowed to bring the killers to justice.

Three days later, the FSB — the country’s main security agency — delivered a report that identified the assassins.

5 ethnic Chechens, some linked to the brutal Kremlin-backed warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, were arrested, tried in a military court, and convicted of murdering Nemtsov.

But awkward questions remained.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, a friend and protégé of Nemtsov, was among the many Russians who wanted to know who ordered the killing…and why? 🔊

One day, they hoped, new evidence might come to light.

And now, seven years later, it has.

Our team #BBCEyeInvestigations, working with @bellingcat & @the_ins_ru, can reveal that in the year running up to his murder, Boris Nemtsov was being shadowed by a government agent linked to a secret assassination squad.

According to his documents, the man’s name is Valery Nikolayevich Sukharev – and all the evidence indicates he serves with the FSB.

Sukharev has no public profile, and as far as we can tell, was unknown to Nemtsov.

But when we got hold of the train and flight reservations Sukharev made that year, and checked them against the known movements of Nemtsov, an unmistakable pattern emerged.

We’ve reconstructed Nemtsov’s movements by cross-referencing his travel booking data against his phone records and his social media posts.

Most of these trips took him from Moscow, where he lived, to Yaroslavl, where he sat in the regional parliament.

According to the booking data we obtained, these are the journeys taken by Boris Nemtsov in the year running up to his murder…

…and these are the trips made by FSB agent Valery Sukharev.

Sukharev made 15 round trips.

On 13 of these journeys, he was shadowing Boris Nemtsov, including on a round trip from Moscow just 10 days before Nemtsov was killed.

The first tail for which we have evidence took place on May 19th 2014.

At 13:35 Nemtsov set off from Moscow’s Yaroslavsky railway station and headed to Yaroslavl, where he was due to attend a meeting in parliament.

Sukharev followed on another train, arriving exactly 25 minutes after Nemtsov.

The next day Sukharev got back to Moscow just after nine o’clock, a day before Nemtsov’s return.

A similar pattern recurs through the autumn and winter of 2014.

Nemtsov takes the train to Yaroslavl, shadowed by Sukharev.

It looks like Sukharev knew Nemtsov’s plans in advance, because he often arrived in the city just ahead of his target.

There’s a break in Nemtsov’s travel pattern: a single trip to Novosibirsk, made in July 2014.

And it’s here that we find something even more interesting.

According to the travel data, Nemtsov booked his flight online on July 2nd, at exactly ten minutes past midnight.

Sukharev was also in Siberia that weekend.

And this time, he was not alone.

His traveling companion was another suspected FSB operative, Alexey Krivoschekov.

The two agents flew in on July 4th, just ahead of their target, and returned to Moscow on July 6th, taking off an hour before Nemtsov.

Nemtsov was in Novosibirsk to present a report on corruption in Russia’s state-owned energy giant, Gazprom.

We don’t know if the two FSB agents attended that speech.

But we do know that they had booked their flights to Novosibirsk at 20 past midnight on July 2nd — exactly 10 minutes after Nemtsov booked his.

How might an FSB agent find out, with such precision, the travel plans of a man he was tailing?

The answer, in Russia, is simple: an FSB database called Magistral.

@christogrozev, Bellingcat’s executive director, tells us how it works 🔊

Magistral makes life a lot easier for Russia’s security agents.

But it can also be used to expose them.

We only know so much about the movements of Sukharev and Krivoschekov because their travel reservations, too, were captured by Magistral 🔊

The records we’re using for this story come from multiple sources – including data exported from Magistral by corrupt officials, sold on the black market, and then obtained by @bellingcat, @the_ins_ru, and the BBC 🔊

The last time we see Sukharev shadowing Nemtsov is in February 2015.

Both men left for Yaroslavl on Monday 16th and came back to Moscow the next day.

An hour before his train left, Nemtsov posted these photos to Facebook.

10 days later he was dead.

Now, if you know anything about Russia, you might be thinking:

“Of course the security agencies were keeping an eye on Nemtsov. That’s what they do.”

But Sukharev was not some low-ranking recruit on routine business.

The FSB’s mandate includes managing internal political threats on behalf of the Kremlin — and in that capacity, agent Sukharev has been linked to at least 2 poisonings, both aimed at prominent critics of Putin.

The first target was Nemtsov’s friend and protégé Vladimir Kara-Murza, who, in the weeks after the shooting, was already pointing the finger of blame towards the Kremlin 🔊

From February to May 2015, according to evidence previously uncovered by @bellingcat, Kara-Murza was himself shadowed on at least four occasions by members of the FSB.

On May 24th he flew to Kazan, tailed by an FSB team which, the travel records show, included Valery Sukharev.

Two days later, back in Moscow, Kara-Murza collapsed, unable to breathe 🔊

Two years later, Vladimir Kara-Murza was poisoned for a second time.

Again, he’d been tailed by FSB agents.

Again, he ended up in a coma.

Again, he survived.

The second target has been described as the man Putin fears most: Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader whose anti-corruption videos have reached millions of young Russians.

Time and again, Navalny has transformed online outrage into real-world protests, threatening the regime and leading directly to his own arrest and imprisonment.

In 2020, Navalny was poisoned using Novichok, a nerve agent developed in the Soviet Union and banned under international law.

Then @bellingcat established that, back in 2017, Navalny had been tailed during his election campaign by an FSB team that included — once again — Valery Sukharev.

Sukharev was not part of the ground team that followed Navalny across Russia 3 years later, in the weeks leading up to the attempted assassination.

But he was in phone contact with at least 4 members of that team as well as with an FSB officer further up the chain of command.

Phone logs reveal that, in the months immediately before the poisoning, Sukharev exchanged almost 150 phone calls or texts with those five members of the Navalny assassination squad.

The attempted murder of Alexei Navalny, in combination with his own poisoning, brought Vladimir Kara-Murza to a shocking conclusion 🔊

Now, this investigation has revealed that a man deeply connected to that assassination squad — and perhaps, in the case of Navalny, among those coordinating it — was tracking Boris Nemtsov across Russia in the months, weeks, and days leading up to his death.

We put these findings to the Russian government and to the FSB.

This is what the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, told us. The FSB did not respond.

As a method of killing your enemies, poison doesn’t always work.

But it offers the assassin one key advantage: deniability.

The victim was diabetic. He drank too much, or overdosed on antidepressants.

All of these things were suggested by state-controlled media after Navalny, Kara-Murza, and other critics of Putin fell ill.

Shooting someone in the back, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin, leaves no such doubts.

But perhaps that was the point 🔊

Seven years later, Russia is waging an all-out war against Ukraine — a war being fought with a ruthless disregard for civilian life.

Back home, opposition to Putin is being crushed. Dissent silenced.

But despite the propaganda and the fear, Boris Nemtsov – and the Russia he stood for – has not been forgotten.

#NemtsovsShadow

You can watch the full film on YouTube (non-UK) >

For the UK audience, it is available on the iPlayer > bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episod…

@bellingcat’s article > bellingcat.com/news/2022/03/2…

@the_ins_ru’s piece > theins.ru/politika/249691

This investigation was a massive team work involving @christogrozev, @YordanTsa, @danielsilas, @antoineschirer, @NedDavies, @CPamment, @bertram_hill1, @jaketacchi, @ggatehouse, @SVanhooymissen, @Dobrokhotov, @the_ins_ru, @EliotHiggins, @bellingcat and many more great people.