Russian court finds five men guilty in slaying of Putin critic Boris Nemtsov

Reporting from MOSCOW —  A jury on Thursday found five men guilty of killing prominent Kremlin critic and Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in 2015, in a trial that his supporters said failed to reveal who had ordered the slaying.

Nemtsov, a deputy prime minister under former President Boris Yeltsin, became a leading opposition figure against President Vladimir Putin. He was fatally shot steps away from the Kremlin in one of the most high-profile killings in post-Soviet Russia.

Nemtsov’s supporters, friends and family criticized how authorities handled the case, saying the investigation did not seek to uncover who ordered the assassination. The court’s decision was merely a show, Nemtsov’s daughter Zhanna Nemtsova posted on her Facebook account minutes after the verdict was announced.

“The investigation and the court fantastically persisted in not recognizing the murder as political,” she said.

The five men — suspected gunman Zaur Dadayev, the driver and three accused of planning the attack — are from Russia’s North Caucasus region and are suspected of having ties to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Russia has fought two brutal wars with Chechnya since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Nemtsov, a fierce critic of Putin’s authoritarian policies, was returning home from the center of Moscow with his girlfriend the night of Feb. 27, 2015, and his route took him across the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, close to the Kremlin.

He was shot several times by a gunman in a passing car. The assassin’s car sped off, and Nemtsov, 55, died at the scene.

Hours before his death, Nemtsov gave an interview to Echo of Moscow radio calling for demonstrations against the Kremlin’s involvement in the war in eastern Ukraine, where Kiev forces have been battling Russia-backed separatist rebels for three years. More than 10,000 people have died in the war, including thousands of civilians.

Within hours of Nemtsov’s death, his friends and supporters blamed the Kremlin for installing a government of fear, in which any voices of opposition were at risk.

Other high-profile killings in Russia include that of journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya, who fiercely criticized Putin’s domestic policies and investigated human rights in Chechnya. She was killed in 2006 in the entrance to her central Moscow apartment. Five men were sentenced for her contracted killing in 2014, but investigators have never arrested a suspect for ordering the killing.

Other prominent victims in what are regarded as politically motivated killings include Natalya Estemirova, a human rights activist who had done significant research in the North Caucasus and was found dead in 2009, and Alexander Litvinenko, a former intelligence officer who was poisoned in 2006 with a radioactive substance. He died in London, and a 2016 British investigation said Putin probably approved his assassination.

Whoever ordered Nemtsov’s killing remains at large, a fact that Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said is not unusual, as “such complex cases are very hard to investigate.… Sometimes this process takes years.”

Peskov said the investigation would continue.

“These cases are classified as the most difficult in solving because it is naturally important to find and bring to justice not only the perpetrators but also the organizers of such murders,” Peskov told reporters.

A sixth suspect, Beslan Shavanov, died when a grenade exploded as police tried to arrest him in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, in March 2015.

A sentencing hearing for the five men found guilty Thursday is expected next week.

The convicted men’s connections to Kadyrov, now a strong Putin loyalist, run deep. The accused gunman, Dadayev, was a deputy commander in a Chechen military battalion with sworn allegiances to Kadyrov. When Dadayev confessed to the crime in 2015, Kadyrov defended him as a “Russian patriot” prepared to give his life to his motherland.

Although many critics of the investigation said the Chechen links were never thoroughly examined in the court hearings, other Nemtsov allies have pointed fingers at what they believe are links to Russia’s intelligence services, namely the Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the Soviet KGB. Putin is a former KGB officer.

“The Kremlin just gave society the killers, and the authorities believe that’s enough,” Ilya Yashin, a close friend and political ally of Nemtsov, said by phone Thursday.

“I do not believe Mr. Peskov, and I don’t believe Mr. Putin,” Yashin said. “I think the key reason that the investigation will stop is because of Kremlin pressure. The people in the Kremlin — Vladimir Putin and his close circle — they understand that the people who killed Nemstov had the state’s authority.”

sabra.ayres@latimes.com

Twitter: @sabraayres

UPDATES:

11:35 a.m.: This article has been updated with more background and an interview with a Nemstov ally.

This article was originally published at 9:25 a.m.