former policy executive in the Government of Canada, is an opinion writer.
What were NATO Supreme Commander, General Phil Breedlove’s thoughts when he heard that Boris Nemtsov, Russia’s political opposition leader and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nemesis, was executed by four bullets to the back?
Video footage of the cold Moscow night shows men getting out of cars, running, darting under the bridge, cars fleeing; a snowplow masking the execution. A beautiful Ukrainian woman is taken by police: Snare or victim? We may never know. She was taken into custody before being allowed to return to Kyiv on March 2. Such is the start of Putin’s “full and transparent” investigation. Crimes within crimes.
Who killed Nemtsov?
He was taken out by those who clean up Putin’s crimes. By those who genuflect and applaud his lies and ersatz patriotism. By the frenzy of hate flowing from him and his ilk -- Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Russian President Sergei Lavrov, propagandist Aleksandr Dugin-- towards a democratic Russia, towards Ukraine, NATO, the United States and all Western democracies.
The hate creates a blood-thirsty mentality equivalent to that which sent Christian to the lions. Singers, orchestra conductors, hockey icons who sell their talents in pro-Putin’s “charm “ offensive killed Nemtsov. “Useful idiots” who make a living in our institutions of learning teaching sedition under the cover of free speech.
People like Edward Snowden and those like Moti Nissani, formerly of Wayne State University, who within hours produced a lengthy piece in Pravda. It rivals the best fuhrer-worship journalism. Nissani writes “...everyone agrees that Putin is a brilliant strategist and politician. ...One has just to watch him improvising a press conference, calmly, competently, and tirelessly, to realize that one is dealing here with...superb statesmanship.” Putin’s last press conference comprised a three-hour-long monologue.
The author wonders what Putin would gain by killing Nemtsov “a small potato, a minor irritant.” And answers by asking, “Does Putin need to kill a man who says that Crimea should effectively belong to Russia's enemies ...despite Crimea's critical importance to Russian security?”
Those endorsing Putin’s terror in Ukraine killed Nemtsov. Putin could not tolerate its rejection of his corrupted and backward empire in favour of the West. Such insolence needed punishment. Will 5,000 dead Ukrainians and no official release of Russia’s dead but estimated in the tens of thousands satiate his need for blood? Nemtsev said that this unnecessary war was not Russia’s war but Putin’s war for the “preservation of personal power and money at any cost.” Nemtsov was compiling a tally of its devastating losses. He was eliminated just like in 2006, when journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was compiling the cost of the Putin’s other war, his needless destruction of Chechnya, was killed.
The West had a hand in his murder, and in those of others. Its misguided decision-makers, hoping to “understand” Putin, reset buttons, give cease-fires a chance only unleash further terror, this time focused in Ukraine. They, de facto, position 63,000 Russian troops on its border. Meanwhile international sages “allege “ that his “humanitarian” convoys might be carrying military hardware. The OSCE is complicit. It conveniently cannot see Putin breaking cease-fire nor his soldiers running back and forth across the boarder in a semblance of withdrawal.
Putin’s collaborators, leaders of the free world who are not up to the task of bringing an international terrorist to justice, killed Boris Nemtsov. So did NATO. Created to protect democracy, it is incapable of finding a new way to deal with Putin’s new insanity running amuck in the world. To its shame, NATO watches from the safe haven while its three-trillion dollar budget rusts. (Breedlove, what would the first Supreme Commander of NATO, General Eisenhower say?) Meanwhile, Nemtsov and thousands of young men get shot, burned for sport, beheaded, mutilated. No, these are not ISIS rag-tag terrorists’ brutalities: These are Putin’s.
No wonder Nemtsov called the war in Ukraine Putin’s insanity. He was killed for protesting Putin’s politics in Russia, the terror in Ukraine, the illegal abduction and incarceration of another hero, Ukraine’s imprisoned fighter pilot Nadiya Savchenko. She is starving to death rather than submit to Putin. Doctors say she only has four-five days left.
Nemtsov said, that Savchenko's life is more important than Putin’s. Like Nemtsov, she is the symbol of the future; Putin is history’s scum. One order executed Nemtsov but many killed him. All of us did by responding to our base greed for money and a comfortable life, rather than to what is right. Some 40,000 did the right thing by joining in Moscow’s tribute march to him. Those who did not endorsed his murder.
History has a hard lesson for collaborators. Do the right thing, Breedlove.
Scribbled Note Shows Nemtsov on Trail of Russian Deaths in Ukraine
By Darya Korsunskaya and
Gabriela Baczynska
MOSCOW (Reuters) - It may have been the last note Boris Nemtsov ever wrote, a hurried scrawl in blue pen on a plain white sheet of A4 paper.
A day before he was shot dead near the Kremlin last week, the Russian opposition figure and his close aide Olga Shorina were discussing a sensitive investigation he was preparing into Moscow's backing for separatist fighters in eastern Ukraine.
Fearing their office was bugged by state intelligence, Nemtsov resorted to scribbling.
"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," said the note, shown to Reuters by Shorina.
"He did not want to say anything, just in case. He did not want to utter it out loud, which is why he wrote it down for me," she said.
It was not possible to independently confirm the authenticity of the handwritten note.
Since last summer, reports have been circulating inside the country that many serving Russian troops have died in combat in eastern Ukraine, where the separatist war has killed more than 6,000 people.
Despite what Ukraine and its Western allies say is overwhelming evidence, Moscow adamantly denies sending arms or troops to the region, saying any Russians fighting in Ukraine are volunteers.
That is why Nemtsov's last report was so sensitive - perhaps sensitive enough, according to some of his friends, to provide at least part of the motive for killing him, though they say they doubt it was the main reason.
Last Friday night, after dining next to Red Square, the 55-year-old former deputy prime minister was shot four times in the back while strolling home with his girlfriend across a bridge within sight of the Kremlin.
He was the most prominent opposition figure to be killed during President Vladimir Putin's 15-year rule. The president has called his death a shameful tragedy, and the Kremlin has denied any involvement.
NO AIR-TIME
Nemtsov was part of a liberal opposition which is supported only by a minority of Russians. He was almost never given air-time on state-run television and radio.
The publication of his report was therefore not likely to resonate with the wider public, which polls show backs Putin's policy on Ukraine. But Shorina said he had been planning to publish 1 million copies, to reach as wide an audience as possible.
In a campaign over many years to expose what he saw as Putin's misrule, Nemtsov had previously published eight reports, including investigations into alleged corruption surrounding last year's Sochi Winter Olympics and into assets owned by the president and his circle.
Shorina and other Nemtsov associates said most of the material he had gathered on Ukraine was from open sources, and that he had not been intending to reveal any explosive new information.
However, she said in the course of research he had been contacted by relatives of a group of Russian soldiers who, according to Nemtsov, had been in action in eastern Ukraine. He was trying to persuade them to make their accounts public.
These were the servicemen who according to Nemtsov's note were based in Ivanovo, a city about 300 km (185 miles) north-east of Moscow which is home to units of the Russian military's 98th paratroop division.
"He was maintaining contact with them," Shorina said. "How he was maintaining contact with them, I don't know, he did not put me in touch with anyone."
Shorina said she and another Nemtsov associate, Ilya Yashin, would try to salvage the information Nemtsov had been gathering and attempt to publish the report in a month. As far as she was aware, he had only managed to write down a table of contents.
She said that for previous reports, Nemtsov had stored most of the information in his head, and would dictate it to her when he was ready.
Yashin said he and Nemtsov had spoken about the Ukraine report about a day and a half before his death.
"He told me he had been in touch with relatives of Russian soldiers killed there and he was planning a trip to Ivanovo to talk to the parents of those killed soldiers," Yashin said.
"He said in the very near future he was going to assemble and put in order various evidence and documents directly proving the presence of the Russian military on the territory of Ukraine and, accordingly, (exposing) President's Putin's lies that there are no Russian servicemen there."
Nemtsov had also settled on a title for the report, Yashin said. He was planning to call it: "Putin and the War".
