Just briefly, in acknowledgment of the fact that my understanding of domestic partisan politics in the Russian Federation leaves at least something to be desired, Boris Nemtsov's assassination is a tragedy on multiple levels. On the most general level, Russia seems to have lost a true political liberal of the sort that might have contributed some momentum in shifting political discourse in the Russian Federation over time toward increased closeness with Europe. As a larger theme in multiple posts to this blog, I have made the argument that Russia desperately needs to shed, on the one hand, its bad memories concerning the Soviet breakup with its negative impact on the geo-political-military stature of Russia vis-à-vis the U.S. and, on the other hand, its nostalgic embrace of the imagery of Tsarist imperial Russia, with ethnic Russian, orthodox Christian military and cultural hegemony enforced over wide swaths of Eurasia. Both such conceptions tend to reinforce the conditions for Russia to focus inwardly in relation to Europe, in the hopes of reconfiguring the balance of military, cultural, and economic power against its immediate neighbors to reconstitute Russia's faded international political stature and messianic Slavophile pretensions. Conversely, Western European leaders in France, Germany, and the U.K. and their emerging Eastern European EU partners in Poland, the Baltic States, Rumania, and other states previously under Soviet political domination need to adopt a more solicitous outlook toward Russia in the long term, eschewing underlying Russophobic ideologies, if Russia is ever to undergo the sort of revolutionary liberalization that would place its government and civil society closer to the European political mainstream. Boris Nemtsov was, at least potentially, the sort of figure who could have nurtured such a transition.
Approaching specifics about his current criticisms against Putin's administration, Nemtsov was apparently assembling evidence of Russian professional military involvement in Donetsk and Lugansk, irreducible to the actions of handfuls of Russian Army "volunteers," freelancing as supporters of pro-Russian Ukrainian citizens. If the validity of such charges directed at Putin's government should have been obvious to all parties, anywhere in the world, then the fact that Russia's domestic political opposition was still willing to hold the president's feet to the fire on such an internationally volatile issue demonstrates that Putin's contentions against official Russian involvement in Ukraine lacked persuasiveness even within quarters of the Russian political establishment. It also seems quite clear that, in their efforts to challenge Putin over Ukraine, Nemtsov and other members of the political opposition were being subjected to intense surveillance and intimidation by the administration and its security apparatus and death threats by anonymous, presumably non-governmental, nationalistic supporters of the annexation of Russian-speaking areas of Eastern Ukraine. In these respects, the Poroshenko government in Kiev has lost at least one erstwhile supporter in Russia's domestic political establishment. Moreover, despite Nemtsov's meritorious perseverance in the face of authoritarian tactics by the Putin government and the government's apparent acquiescence in vigilanteism by the nationalist right, it is at least probable that Nemtsov's assassination will further curtail efforts by remaining opposition leaders to aggressively call Putin to account on Ukraine. It seems likely that initiatives by Western European leaders to restrain Russian interference in Ukraine will be somewhat less effective if the domestic opposition is decisively silenced on Ukraine, especially to the extent that an overwhelming majority of the Russian population continues to support Putin's leadership over the course of the war in Donetsk and Lugansk.
Concluding, I would expect that any official investigation of Nemtsov's murder will not yield an indictment of any agents of the Russian government and, still less, any suggestion that Nemtsov's murder was ordered by Putin or any other senior leadership in the government. The implication that Nemtsov was being silenced for what he was planning to reveal about government actions in Ukraine certainly comports with the larger image of contemporary Russian authoritarianism, waged by an ex-KGB president with connections to many, many other well armed and financed mid-level ex-KGB thugs. It is, of course, possible that Nemtsov's assassination happened with official approval for just such a reason, and, if it did, we will never know about it. On the other hand, I think that it is at least as likely that Nemtsov's assassin hailed from the ultra-nationalist right, otherwise unaffiliated with the Putin government. In a political environment where figures like Nemtsov have been painted by Russia's mainstream media as pawns executing Western plans to undermine Russia's efforts to reassert its natural hegemony over Eurasia and transcend the tragedy of Soviet defeat, who knows how many ultra-nationalist enemies Nemtsov had made by calling Russian militarism into question? As such, the Putin government deserves more blame for creating an environment, through intimidation of opposition figures by security forces, censorship and manipulation of the mass communications media, and selective support/countenancing of armed, violent nationalist entities, where the real functions of democratic discourse, to hold governments to account before an informed populace, cannot operate. In this sense, it really doesn't matter whether Putin pulled the trigger to kill Nemtsov - his policies toward the domestic opposition created the conditions through which Nemtsov would be targeted for execution.
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