One evening in February the Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov went to see his friend and colleague, Ilya Yashin, to ask for help with his latest investigation: a sensitive report on Russian soldiers secretly fighting in Ukraine.
Two days later Nemtsov, a relentless critic of Vladimir Putin, was shot dead near the Kremlin as he was walking home.
Now, the report that Nemtsov never wrote will be published today after being completed by a group of opposition activists and journalists led by Yashin, who pieced together the trail that the slain former deputy prime minister left behind.
“I realised it was my duty to the memory of my dead
comrade to take this work to its end and publish the report that he began,”
Yashin said.
Relatives
Initially, Yashin and his colleagues did not know whether they had enough material to finalise the document.
Nemtsov had already sketched out its outlines, contents and its “ideology”. He had gathered documents pointing to the presence of Russian military equipment in Ukraine and had interviewed representatives of several relatives of soldiers killed in eastern Ukraine, Yashin said.
But much of this small archive disappeared after his
assassination, which has been blamed on five
men from the North Caucasus region of Chechnya.
After Nemtsov was shot dead as he walked
home across a bridge in the centre of Moscow, investigators swept his
apartment, confiscating computers, hard drives, address books and notebooks,
his friends say.
“We spent the first week restoring all
the documents he’d gathered, which had been seized by investigators,” said
Yashin. “Some of the documents were stored with his assistants and his
employees.”
These documents included scraps from
Nemstov’s investigation, such as a handwritten note Nemtsov passed to his
assistant, Olga Shorina, on the eve of his assassination.
The note – apparently scrawled on paper in order to
avoid possible listening devices and first
shown to Reuters in March –
reads: “Some paratroopers have got in touch with me. Seventeen killed, they
didn’t give them their money, but for now they are frightened to talk.”
The Kremlin has repeatedly rejected
accusations by Kiev and western governments that Russia is
providing weapons and personnel to separatists battling Ukrainian forces in
eastern Ukraine.
Yashin says he and his team managed to
get in touch with all of Nemtsov’s contacts, but that persuading them to go on
the record proved to be an insurmountable challenge.
“As you can imagine, the death of
Nemtsov did not make them bolder,” he said.
“We spoke to them, and we did get
specific, really important information from them, but they categorically
declined to speak publicly,” Yashin added.
“We were persuading them to go on the
record, saying that it would be much safer for them to speak publicly than to
speak to us secretly.”
Their efforts were
ultimately futile, he
added. “This wall of fear that we came up against was probably the biggest
problem.”
Open sources
The report will be presented to
journalists and activists at the Moscow headquarters of the political party
Nemtsov co-founded, RPR Parnas today.
Much of its material appears to rely on
open sources, as did the eight previous reports that Nemtsov published on
issues such as corruption and the Sochi Winter Olympics.
Opposition activists and well-known
Russian journalists were brought in to contribute to the report, including Ilya
Barabanov of Kommersant, who haswritten extensively from
eastern Ukraine, and Lev Shlosberg, a member of the liberal opposition Yabloko
party in the western city of Pskov.
Shlosberg was badly beaten by
unidentified men after
he exposed secret funerals of two soldiers killed fighting in Ukraine.
Yashin said that he and his colleagues
have invested in a preliminary print run of 3,000 copies of the report, which
will also be posted online. He intends to raise money to fund a planned first
mass print run later this month, though past experience suggests circulating
Nemtsov’s report may be difficult.
“We’re already running into big problems,” said
Yashin. “Printing shops are being pressured, and so it’s going to take a real
special operation to print a big run in May. We have experience with this, and
Boris Nemtsov had experience with this. I think we’ll get over this problem.”
In 2010, police seized a car containing
100,000 copies of Nemtsov’s joint reporton the boom in corruption during Putin’s first 10
years in power. The report’s website was also hit by cyber attacks.
Nemtsov’s assassination on 27 February
provoked an outpouring
of grief, particularly in
Moscow where mounds of flowers and photographs still lie at the spot where he
was killed.
Overall however, polls show that the overwhelming
majority of Russians support Putin’s policies in Ukraine.
Nonetheless, Yashin is adamant that the report will
make a splash.
“Judging by how we are being hindered in even printing
a small run, there is going to be a fair amount of resonance,” he said. “We
realise that we are striking where it hurts.”
The goal of the report, he says, is to “disprove
lies.”
“They say there aren’t Russian troops [in Ukraine],”
Yashin said. “We say there are. For Putin, it’s very painful to be caught
lying.”
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