A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia's War with the West

13 Leviathan ^{Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, Moscow, 27 February 2015}

Boris Nemtsov was in good spirits. It was February 2015 and Nemtsov – once Russia’s deputy prime minister but for many years at odds with official power – was due to lead an anti-government rally. True, the authorities had banished the protesters to Marino, a gritty suburb of Soviet high-rises in Moscow’s distant south-east. And true, Russia’s opposition was, generally speaking, in poor shape.

A few years earlier it was just about possible to fantasise that street power might drive Putin from office. His announcement that he was ‘returning’ to the presidency – after four years as prime minister – triggered the biggest demonstrations since the end of the Soviet Union. But the euphoric rebel mood of 2011–12 was gone. People had been arrested and given lengthy jail terms; Putin had enacted the worst human-rights crackdown for decades; human-rights groups were being forced to register themselves as ‘foreign agents’.

The Putin era looked interminable. Brezhnev did eighteen years as general secretary of the Communist Party, his rule associated with stagnation. Putin – on fifteen – seemed poised to overtake him. In 2017 Putin would likely stand again as president. Another seven years would take him to 2024.

And then there was the war in Ukraine. In the wake of Crimea’s annexation, the president’s ratings had skyrocketed. Many former liberals had embraced the new patriotism, cut dead their western acquaintances, and adopted the slogan Krym Nash – Crimea is ours! One morning a Dutch reporter in Moscow – married to a Russian woman and with a small child – found the words ‘Nato out’ written on his postbox in the stairwell of their communal apartment building. Nationalism – sullen and defiant – was everywhere.

Against this backdrop, Nemtsov knew that the numbers for the rally would be relatively modest. Even if the turnout were huge, the protest wouldn’t feature on night-time TV. Nemtsov hadn’t appeared on federal channels for eight years. The Kremlin had slowly strangled Russia’s opposition, denying it finance, airtime and the ability to take part in elections. Those indomitable souls who kept going weren’t activists but this century’s dissidents, in the tradition of Sakharov and Bukovsky.

Since 2000, Russia had gone from a semi-democracy into something approaching a dictatorship. So why bother? Well, for one thing Nemtsov believed in democratic methods, even though democracy in Russia had practically disappeared. For another, there was Putin’s covert invasion of Ukraine. According to Putin, Russian forces played no role in the conflict. The lie was so blatant, so ridiculous and so easily disprovable, it gifted fresh impetus to Russia’s liberal intelligentsia, lifting them out of their low morale and disarray.

It was a Friday, 27 February. The march – dubbed ‘Spring’ – was due to take place on Sunday, 1 March. Nemtsov was sitting in the studio of Echo of Moscow, the independent radio station. Many opposition media outlets had closed since Putin resumed the presidency in 2012, for the third time. Somehow Echo of Moscow survived. Nemtsov was a frequent guest here. He was dressed casually, as always, in jeans and a turquoise jumper. Nemtsov was an alluring figure – fifty-five years old, good-looking, charismatic.

During his early political career, he had enjoyed high office. He came to prominence in the 1990s as the governor of Nizhny Novgorod. A reformist, a liberal and a supporter of Boris Yeltsin, he rose in 1997–8 to become deputy prime minister. He was talented and genuinely popular, with more than a sprinkling of stardust. Was he, as some thought, even a future president?

In fact, the new millennium belonged to Putin, an obscure and charmless KGB agent. Nemtsov started his own liberal party, the Union of Right Forces, which in the early stages of Putin’s presidency was electorally competitive. Slowly, however, he was squeezed out – from the Duma, from TV, from public space. He carried on anyway – co-founding another democratic party, Solidarity, in 2008, and standing to be mayor of Sochi, his home town, the following year.

I first met Nemtsov in 2009, on the campaign trail. We sat together in a rusty yellow minivan as it rattled up Sochi’s steep hills. Nemtsov was bitterly critical of the forthcoming Sochi Olympics, a project mired in corruption and ‘banditism’. He visited sanatoria and held meetings with local Sochi workers. He was a charming and persuasive candidate.

Terrified that their apparatchik candidate might lose, the local Sochi authorities banned Nemtsov from appearing on TV and in local newspapers. He faced dirty tricks and a pro-Kremlin activist chucked ammonia in his face. The Kremlin candidate won. Undeterred, in 2011 Nemtsov co-founded the Popular Freedom party – together with Mikhail Kasyanov, the former PM. Election officials refused to register it.

Even now, Nemtsov had not lost hope. During the interview with Echo of Moscow, Nemtsov came across as honest and cogent. He rubbished the Kremlin’s mismanagement of Russia’s economy and its ‘dead-end domestic politics’. The current model, of giant state corporations run by incompetent bureaucrats, had failed, he said. Much of Russia was in a state of crumbling decay. He wanted an improved deal for the provinces, an end to rigged elections, better healthcare.

But his main preoccupation was Putin’s Big Lie. Nemtsov had always seen his role as educational. He would explain to voters, argue with them, debate. At a time of blanket state propaganda this mission – you could call it enlightenment – was more important than ever.

The interview lasted an hour. Nemtsov told the station’s listeners that he had ‘documentary proof’ that undercover Russian soldiers were fighting and dying in eastern Ukraine. This was borne out by a steady flow of zinc coffins returning in the dead of night from the war zone in Donetsk and Luhansk – back to Russian cities like Pskov, Kostroma and Nizhny Novgorod, where Nemtsov was once governor. Putin wasn’t just a liar – he was a specialist in lying, Nemtsov said. A ‘pathological liar’, in fact.

The interview went well. Nemtsov was optimistic that a well-attended march for peace might have a sobering effect on the Kremlin, and challenge the prevalent mood of ugly nationalism. That evening he had a late dinner with his girlfriend, Anna Duritskaya. She was Ukrainian and he’d collected her from the airport that morning. They ate at a café in GUM, the State Department Store, famous in Soviet times and now a capitalist shopping mall with worn marble stairs and ornate balconies off Red Square. Fairy lights outlined the nineteenth-century building. The café, Bosco, looked out onto Lenin’s tomb.

Normally, Nemtsov would drive home in his Land Rover. He decided instead to walk. They took a scenic route south past the red walls of the Kremlin, the iconic Spassky tower, and the surrealistic domes of St Basil’s cathedral.

This was Russia’s most protected area. Wherever you looked there were CCTV cameras; unauthorised demonstrators who popped up here in the heart of political power were detained in a matter of seconds. The Kremlin even had its own powerful internal agency, the Federal Protection Service or FSO, with thousands of agents. It took care of security around state buildings.

Around 11.30 p.m., Nemtsov and Duritskaya started walking across Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge. Beneath them was the Moskva river, cold, glittering, black.

The bridge offered a panoramic view of the city’s illuminated skyline. Tourists come here to photograph St Basil’s, dazzlingly floodlit at night and flanked by the white towers and golden domes of the Kremlin’s churches and cathedrals. There were generous views along the river. The Gothic Kotelnicheskaya apartment building hulked imperiously over the water to the east, one of the capital’s seven Stalin-era skyscrapers; in the opposite direction you could see the ivory edifice of Christ the Saviour cathedral – demolished by Stalin, rebuilt by Yeltsin – and the beginnings of Gorky Park.

Normally there was traffic. At this moment the bridge was oddly deserted. Only two vehicles were visible: a slow-moving municipal truck hugging the pavement and a white car. According to Duritskaya, someone emerged from immediately behind them. She didn’t see his face. The assassin shot Nemtsov six times in the back. Four bullets hit him, one in the heart; he died instantly. The killer jumped into the car. It reversed back towards Nemtsov’s body – seemingly to check if he was dead – and then shot off into the night.

The hitmen were evidently professionals. Their weapon was a Makarov pistol, a standard Russian and Soviet police-issue semi-automatic. Six 9-mm cartridge cases were recovered.

Nemtsov was the victim not of a subtle poison but of old-school mafia methods. The location too told its own chilling and melodramatic story: an opponent of Putin lying dead in the street, under the implacable walls of Russian power, and next to St Basil’s, the country’s chocolate box landmark. The visual scene was perfect for TV. The first militia officers turned up. There was nothing to be done. They heaved Nemtsov’s body into a black plastic bag.

It seemed extraordinary that a former vice premier could be murdered here, outside the Russian equivalent of the White House or the Houses of Parliament, with the shooter apparently able to simply drive off.

The murder of Boris Nemtsov was Russia’s most high-profile political assassination for seventeen years. (In 1998 the liberal politician Galina Starovoytova – a notable opponent of the security services – was shot dead in the stairwell of her apartment building in St Petersburg.) Nemtsov’s body had scarcely been loaded into an ambulance before the Kremlin responded. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman, said that the president believed the murder was a ‘provocation’.

‘With all due respect to the memory of Boris Nemtsov, in political terms he did not pose any threat to the current Russian leadership or Vladimir Putin. If we compare popularity levels, Putin’s and the government’s ratings and so on, in general Boris Nemtsov was just a little bit more than an average citizen,’ Peskov said. The rhetoric – insignificant, irrelevant, etc. – was reminiscent of Putin’s response to the murders of Litvinenko and Politkovskaya.

The word ‘provocation’ carries its own special meaning in Russian. What Putin meant is that whoever murdered Nemtsov did so to discredit the state. Since the state was the primary victim here, the state couldn’t be held responsible, this logic runs.

The office of Russia’s prosecutor general offered an array of motives to explain Nemtsov’s murder. None seemed convincing. It suggested his killing might be the work of Islamist extremists, radical Ukrainian factions, or the opposition itself, which could have used Nemtsov as a ‘sacrificial victim’. Putin’s ally Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen president, accused ‘western spy agencies’. They were trying to ‘destabilise Russia’, he said. The muckraking website LifeNews.ru, which has links with the FSB, pointed to Nemtsov’s colourful love life and his relationship with Duritskaya, a 23-year-old model and Ukrainian citizen.

The investigative committee seemed to be moving in a predictable direction: towards an old-fashioned cover-up. Officials released one carefully curated CCTV film taken from far away. The municipal truck obscures the moment when Nemtsov is killed. The video offers few clues. There are no close-ups of the suspects. Three days after Nemtsov’s death, officials told Kommersant newspaper that the Kremlin’s CCTV cameras immediately next to the spot where he was shot ‘weren’t working’.

Like all high-profile critics, Nemtsov was under close FSB surveillance. The spy agency would have monitored Nemtsov carefully: it expends enormous efforts on keeping track of its targets. On this occasion, however, an organisation known for its resources and unlimited manpower seems to have lost him. Meanwhile, his killers appear to have had real-time intelligence concerning his movements.

The murder made headlines around the world. The Russian authorities avoided the one explanation that made sense: that Nemtsov was shot for his opposition activities. Specifically, for his public criticism of the war in Ukraine, in which – at the time of his death – at least 6,000 people had been killed and 2 million displaced.

In his last Echo of Moscow interview, Nemtsov had called Putin’s intervention in Ukraine ‘insane’, and ‘murderous’ for Russia and its citizens. He described the takeover of Crimea as ‘illegal’, though he acknowledged it had the consent of many Crimeans.

At the time of his death, Nemtsov had been gathering material for a new report on Ukraine. Its contents were to have been explosive. Over the years he had written eight pamphlets on a variety of themes. One of them, Putin: A Reckoning, accused the president and his circle of massive personal corruption. It said that they had accumulated enormous personal wealth by pillaging oil revenues. Nemtsov shared Litvinenko’s thesis that Russia had grown into a mafia state. He alleged Putin had links with the Tambov crime group.

Another Nemtsov booklet targeted Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow’s mayor, and his billionaire wife Elena Baturina. (A year after it came out in 2009, Medvedev gave Luzhkov the boot.) There were further dossiers on the 2014 Sochi Olympics, where billions of dollars of public money had gone missing, and Gazprom.

According to his aide, Olga Shorina, Nemtsov came up with the idea of a Ukraine dossier in early 2015. It was to be called Putin and the War. It would reveal how Russian commanders had secretly smuggled servicemen into Ukraine to fight in the Donbas. His friend, the opposition leader Ilya Yashin, said that one morning Nemtsov turned up at his party HQ and announced triumphantly: ‘I’ve thought what to do. We need to write a report, publish it with a massive circulation, and distribute it on the streets. We explain how Putin unleashed this war. Only that way can we beat the propaganda.’

Nemtsov believed that opposing the war was a patriotic act, Yashin said – and that by handing out the dossier outside metro stations he could punch through the wall of state disinformation. Putin’s intervention in Ukraine was ‘base and cynical’. It had led directly to sanctions, international isolation and the needless deaths of Russian citizens. The idea germinated in February, when relatives of servicemen killed in eastern Ukraine approached Nemtsov. The Russian ministry of defence was refusing to pay the families compensation – since the soldiers had, like so many ghosts, never officially been there.

Hours before his murder, Nemtsov wrote a note to Shorina. Scribbled in blue Biro, on a sheet of white A4, it said: ’Some paratroopers from Ivanovo have got in touch with me. 17 killed. They didn’t give them their money, but for now they are frightened to talk.’ Ivanovo was 185 miles (300 km) north-east of Moscow and home to the Russian army’s 98th paratroop division. There were no other details.

As the authorities perfectly knew, Nemtsov’s investigation was a bold challenge to Putin. From late 2013 onwards, the president had used his monopoly over state TV – watched by the overwhelming majority of Russians and the prime source of political information – to unleash a wave of nationalist hysteria and hatred. TV depicted the uprising in Ukraine as a ‘fascist coup’, backed by America. Ukraine’s new provisional government was a ‘fascist junta’.

According to this narrative, the rebellion in the east – actually choreographed by Moscow and its special services – was a continuation of the great patriotic war fought in 1941–5 by the Red Army against the Nazis.

The propaganda had little basis in reality. The far-right Pravy Sektor won less than 2 per cent of the vote in Ukrainian parliamentary elections in 2014 but was presented every evening as Ukraine’s ruling political party. Some stories were wildly exaggerated. Others were made up. An eyewitness told Channel One she had watched Ukrainian Nazis crucify a six-year-old Russian boy in Slavyansk. The report was a lurid invention. However, the remorseless campaign worked. Most Russians believed that fascists were torturing and murdering their brother Slavs in eastern Ukraine; that the conflict next door was ‘unfinished business’.

The prevailing ideas on Russian TV talk shows were familiar ones – victimhood; encirclement by the west; the evils of Nato; Russia’s reemergence as a great power; the US’s swooping plan for global hegemony.

At the same time, the propaganda had a dark internal message. The Kremlin branded those at home who opposed the war as fifth columnists. Russia’s opposition supporters had grown used to the accusation that they were western stooges, paid by the US State Department, whose goal was to install a pro-US puppet government. A sign at one opposition rally joked: ‘Hillary, I’m still waiting for my money.’

As the war intensified, the humour disappeared, and the accusations got nastier. Online lists began to circulate identifying ‘national traitors’. The NTV channel ran a series of ‘exposés’ claiming links between anti-government activists and the CIA. It began planning a hatchet job on Nemtsov, entitled Anatomy of a Protest, to be broadcast on the day of the 1 March rally.

Nemtsov was aware that this swirling toxic climate made him vulnerable. As well as opposing the war in Ukraine, he had lobbied western leaders to impose sanctions on Russia, an action bound to infuriate the Kremlin elite. He was one of only two or three opposition leaders who could talk directly to Washington, Brussels and London. Sanctions – linked to Magnitsky or Ukraine – were a threat to the financial interests of Putin and his circle. And, from their point of view, treason – a betrayal every bit as great as Litvinenko’s.

In an interview with the Financial Times, four days before he was gunned down, Nemtsov said Putin was distinctly capable of murder: ‘He is a totally amoral human being. Totally amoral. He is a Leviathan.’ He added: ‘Putin is very dangerous. He is more dangerous than the Soviets were. In the Soviet Union, there was at least a system, and decisions were taken by the politburo. Decisions about war, decisions to kill people, were not taken by Brezhnev alone, or Andropov either. But that’s how it works now.’

By 2015, Nemtsov was one of the few opposition leaders still based in Russia. Many had gone abroad. The former oligarch and prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky lived in Switzerland and the UK; Kasparov, the ex-chess champion turned Putin critic, was in self-exile in New York. The anti-Kremlin blogger Alexei Navalny remained in Moscow, though under house arrest. Prominent journalists and economists had departed too. Some moved to Paris or Chicago. Others went to London, following a well-trodden path taken by Litvinenko a decade and a half earlier – and by Lenin, a century before that.

The peace rally Nemtsov had been planning to lead turned into his funeral march. Fifty thousand mourners filled Moscow’s embankment: a human mass dressed in thick hats and padded winter coats. They carried flowers, icons, Russian tricolours, homemade placards, and photos of Nemtsov with the words ‘Boris’ and ‘I am not afraid’, in black and white. Posters linked the four bullets that killed him to Russia’s four federal TV channels. One read: ‘Propaganda kills’. The spot on Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge where he fell became a makeshift shrine, heaped with tulips and red carnations.

It was an icy day, with a grey sky; the queue to pay respects stretched around the Garden Ring road. Nemtsov’s body was moved in a hearse and then lay in an open coffin for four hours, inside a museum dedicated to Sakharov, the nuclear scientist turned dissident. There were similar memorial meetings across Russia – in St Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Kaliningrad, Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod – with smaller gatherings in European capitals. Neither Putin nor prime minister Dmitry Medvedev came. The chief mourner was Nemtsov’s 88-year-old mother; the mood one of profound shock and gloom.

The Kremlin said it had nothing to do with the murder.

Nemtsov’s friends found this denial unpersuasive. They believe that Putin may well have ordered his killing. Or that shadowy nationalist forces were allowed to eliminate someone routinely derided as a US spy. Either way, Putin deliberately fostered the atmosphere of hysteria and hatred that made Nemtsov’s assassination possible; he was, therefore, morally responsible, they argue. As the journalist Ksenia Sobchak told the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, Shaun Walker, it was somehow worse if Putin hadn’t given the command to kill. That meant the president had constructed an ‘appalling terminator’ and ‘lost control of it’.

Putin promised to take the investigation into Nemtsov’s murder under his personal control. The statement didn’t inspire confidence and led the satirical magazine Private Eye to feature Putin on its cover with this remark. Putin is giving a large wink. Within days, the case resembled the unsatisfactory probes into earlier politically motivated killings in Russia. There were suspects – or, better, fall guys – but no real evidence, no motive, and a lingering sense that those who ordered the murder would escape justice once more.

Traditionally, the KGB and its successor the FSB had employed hitmen from the North Caucasus to carry out political killings. In his book Blowing Up Russia, Litvinenko recalled how the FSB used contract killers to liquidate a mafia boss in Yaroslavl. After doing the job, they abandoned their automatics at the scene together with the ID of a Chechen: ‘The operation’s Moscow controllers thought it would be a good idea to send the investigation off along the “Chechen trail”,’ Litvinenko wrote.

There were advantages to using outside killers. Any clues leading back to state organs were impossible to find. Such men were expendable.

What happened next was predictable and darkly ridiculous. Investigators arrested a Chechen, Zaur Dadayev, the deputy commander of the Chechen interior ministry’s northern battalion. According to police, Dadayev confessed to shooting Nemtsov. Dadayev had close links with the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Kadyrov duly provided a ‘motive’ to excuse the crime: Dadayev had been ‘shocked’ by Nemtsov’s support for the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists gunned down in January in Paris by Islamist terrorists.

Four other Chechen suspects were rounded up. Another, Beslan Shavonov, allegedly ‘blew himself up’ when police tried to capture him in the Chechen capital Grozny, officials indicated. The suspects were paraded in front of journalists in Moscow. Dadayev, however, recanted his confession and said he’d been beaten in custody. Human rights observers recorded bruises and cuts on the arms and legs of the other accused.

Nemtsov had been one of the few politicians brave enough to criticise Kadyrov. He said openly what was well understood inside the Russian government: that Chechnya had become an out-of-control entity, corrupt, criminalised and increasingly dangerous. Formally it is part of the Russian Federation. In reality, it is an autonomous rogue fiefdom run by one psychotic strongman, to whom Moscow pays tribute in the form of large budget payments.

In January, Nemtsov had attacked Kadyrov on Facebook. Kadyrov had said that Khodorkovsky was an enemy of Putin’s, an assertion that had chilling implications. Nemtsov re-posted a list of Kadyrov’s alleged victims. It included Chechen émigrés gunned down in Dubai and Vienna. One was Umar Israilov, a 27-year-old former insurgent who filed a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights alleging that Kadyrov had personally tortured him in a secret prison. In 2006, emissaries from Kadyrov ambushed Israilov outside a supermarket in Vienna and shot him in the head.

Now Kadyrov was claiming that Nemtsov’s murder was unrelated to internal Russian affairs. Rather, he was killed because he had offended Islam, Kadyrov proposed, with Dadayev acting from ‘religious feelings’. The Nemtsov investigation looked like a carbon copy of the bungled case into the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, who had been shot dead just before Litvinenko was poisoned in October 2006. It was widely believed that Kadyrov had ordered the hit on the journalist. Several men from the North Caucasus were tried for her murder; I attended their first Moscow trial. But the mastermind and motive remained obscure.

The Kremlin’s aim was to avoid an evidence-led inquiry into Nemtsov’s assassination, it seemed, and to confuse the public mind. The numerous ‘versions’ of Nemtsov’s murder – from love tiff to Charlie Hebdo-inspired Islamists to ‘provocation’ – were part of a sophisticated media strategy with its roots in KGB doctrine. As with Litvinenko, or MH17, there were multiple explanations. How was one supposed to know which one was actually true?

In fact, the aim is to blur what is true with what is not, to the point that the truth disappears altogether. By noisily asserting something that is false, you create a fake counter-reality. In time this constructed sovereign version of events becomes real – at least in the minds of those who are watching.

RT, the Kremlin’s ambitious English-language propaganda channel, uses these same methods for western audiences. Its boss, Margarita Simonyan, argues that there is no such thing as truth, merely narrative. Russia’s narrative is just as valid as the ‘western narrative’, she argues. In this cynical relativistic world of swirling rival versions, nothing is really true.

In a notable editorial after Nemtsov’s murder, the Guardian described this approach as ‘weaponised relativism’:

‘Like so much electronic chaff dropped out of the back of a Tupolev bomber to confuse an incoming missile, the idea that there are multiple interpretations of the truth has become the founding philosophy of state disinformation in Putin’s Russia, designed to confuse those who would seek out the truth with multiple expressions of distracting PR chaff. The tactic is to create as many competing narratives as possible. And, amid all the resultant hermeneutic chaos, to quietly slip away undetected.’

The tactic, the editorial noted, wasn’t new. It came ‘straight out of Mr Putin’s KGB playbook from the 1970s’.

In May 2015, Nemtsov’s friends published the report he was unable to finish. After his death police seized his computer and hard drives. His friends – Olga Shorina, Ilya Yashin, Sergei Alexashenko, Oleg Kashin – made use of Nemtsov’s jottings and notes. ‘Our task: to tell the truth about Kremlin interference in Ukraine’s politics, which has led to war between our peoples. Led to a war that must be quickly stopped,’ they write in the introduction.

As with Nemtsov’s previous reports, the sixty-five-page dossier is based on open sources. It includes interviews with Russian soldiers who had served in Crimea and the Donbas, photos, YouTube videos and social media posts. Also featured are Nemtsov’s letters to Alexander Bortnikov, the FSB chief, and to Russia’s prosecutor general. These reference Russian media articles which said that Russian troops had crossed into Ukraine, an illegal act. Alexashenko, a former deputy governor of Moscow’s central bank, now based in the US, called the dossier a Wikipedia-style guide to the Crimean–Ukraine war.

According to Nemtsov, the Kremlin began secretly planning its Crimea operation in detail as far back as 2012. The goal was to improve the president’s approval rating, which had sunk to 45 per cent (and by spring 2015 had shot up to 74 per cent). The FSB began actively recruiting generals and officers inside the Ukrainian army, funding pro-Russian groups and media, and offering credit to Crimean business. The revolution in Kiev offered the perfect moment for Putin to push the button on this military plan to seize the Black Sea peninsula.

As well as an invasion by ‘little green men’, state propaganda reached ‘monstrous’ levels, the report says. The Kremlin’s earlier efforts at brainwashing seemed, by comparison, ‘vegetarian’. Federal channels took anti-Americanism to new and extravagant levels. Putin’s favourite TV host, Dmitry Kiselyov, told his viewers that Russia was the only country capable of ‘turning the US into radioactive dust’; the idea of a nuclear first strike, by Moscow against the west, was discussed. The result: an ‘atmosphere of continuous hate’.

In summer 2014, Putin categorically denied claims that serving Russian soldiers and military instructors were in Ukraine. This was, he said, an ‘American lie’. The report, however, says that Russian troops took part in the fighting and played a decisive role in the conflict. In August 2014, the Ukrainian army was advancing on all fronts. It had driven the rebels from Slavyansk back to Donetsk and had cut off the DNR and LNR from each other. Ukrainian troops were on the brink of seizing back the border with Russia – a move that would sever the rebels’ supply lines.

The Kremlin responded with reinforcements, including heavy weaponry and some regular troops. Moscow sent across the border 120 armoured vehicles – including thirty tanks – and around 1,200 regular servicemen. The Russian counter-attack wiped out Ukrainian troops in and around the town of Ilovaisk. A similar offensive in February 2015 involving Russian tank units made possible the capture by rebels of the Ukrainian government-held city of Debaltseve, straightening a bulge on the map.

These Russian-aided offensives significantly expanded the territory under rebel control. But they came at a price. At least 220 Russian soldiers were killed fighting in eastern Ukraine, the report says. The figure included 150 killed during the battle for Ilovaisk and at least seventy in January and February 2015, as fighting intensified – including Nemtsov’s seventeen paratroopers from Ivanovo. The figure was based on provable cases. The real death toll was likely much higher, the report adds.

In response to embarrassing evidence of Russian involvement in Ukraine, the Kremlin changed tactics. It ‘fired’ soldiers from the army before sending them as ‘volunteers’ across the Russo-Ukrainian border in small groups. Other ‘volunteers’ were really mercenaries, recruited from veterans’ organisations and centres inside Russia, and paid average salaries of $1,200 a month. The report estimates the bill to Russia for the first ten months of the conflict at $1 billion – for mercenaries, separatists and the upkeep of military hardware, supplied from Russia.

The DNR and LNR, meanwhile, are under the direct control of the Kremlin, the report says. The republics’ chief political and military leaders are Russian citizens. Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s aide and political spin-doctor, is in charge of the official structures in eastern Ukraine, the report adds. It quotes Andrei Borodai, the DNR’s first ‘prime minister’, who in summer 2014 described Surkov as ‘our man in the Kremlin’.

Nemtsov didn’t live to see its publication. But his document was an important – and damning – piece of work. It features tragic photos: of young men, in their early twenties, wearing military berets and smiling with their girlfriends. And of a row of coffins, decorated in red satin, being unloaded from the back of a truck. And graves. Another photo, extensively examined and verified by the authors, shows a plume of smoke above the town of Torez. There is blue sky, cornfields, trees. The smoke comes from the rocket fired shortly before at Malaysian airlines MH17.

One of the mourners at Nemtsov’s funeral was Vladimir Kara-Murza. Kara-Murza is thirty-three years old, a prominent opposition activist and a member of the board of Nemtsov’s People’s Progress Party. His father – Vladimir Kara-Murza Sr – is a distinguished journalist with the same name. Kara-Murza Jr was closely involved in the publication of Nemtsov’s report. He works for Open Russia, a pro-democracy organisation funded by Khodorkovsky, with offices in Moscow, London and Prague.

Kara-Murza was an outspoken anti-Putin critic who was well known on both sides of the Atlantic. He was educated in England (reading history at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where contemporaries considered him brilliant) and had joint UK–Russian citizenship. There, he met Litvinenko and Bukovsky. He moved to the US and lived with his wife Evgenia and their three children near Washington DC. Latterly, he had gone back to Moscow.

Like Nemtsov, Kara-Murza badly annoyed the Kremlin. He played a key role in rallying support for a Magnitsky act and western sanctions against corrupt Russian officials; he lobbied on Capitol Hill and testified before Congress and European parliaments. He blogged for World Affairs, a US journal. Some wondered whether moving back to Russia was a good idea. Marina Litvinenko saw him in London in 2014. ‘I asked him how he felt about going back to Moscow. He told me: “I believe it will be fine.” I wasn’t so sure,’ she told me.

Nemtsov’s murder badly shook Kara-Murza. He spoke at the funeral. ‘A sense of political tragedy for Russia has been overshadowed by an irreplaceable personal loss,’ he wrote, summing up the mood among Nemtsov’s friends, and adding: ‘Boris Nemtsov will not live to see the day Russia becomes a democratic country. But when that day comes, his contribution to it will be one of the greatest.’

In April, Moscow police raided the offices of Open Russia. The NGO hadn’t registered with the authorities in an attempt to avoid the fate of other human-rights groups which had been shut down. Police said they were looking for evidence of ‘extremism’. Kara-Murza’s latest project was a twenty-six-minute documentary film, Family. Its subject was Kadyrov. It alleged that the Chechen president is guilty of widespread human-rights abuses, presides over a personal army of 80,000 fighters, and skims off money from the federal budget.

Two days after a screening in Moscow, Kara-Murza collapsed in his office. He lost consciousness. His symptoms – a sudden incapacitating illness leading to immediate multiple organ failure – were troubling and strange. An ambulance took him to Moscow’s First City Clinical Hospital. Doctors put him on life support. His condition was critical. As he hovered on the edge of death, Kara-Murza’s father said his son was suffering from some kind of ‘intoxication’. He believed he may have been poisoned.

Kara-Murza’s illness remained undiagnosed and undetermined. Doctors appeared reluctant to give an explanation or to use the word poisoning. His family were circumspect. They seemed fearful that even in hospital Kara-Murza might not be safe.

Later he recovered. It appeared the FSB’s poisons factory was still in business.