For more than two years now, anyone walking across Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge – steps away from Moscow’s iconic St. Basil’s Cathedral and a few hundred yards from the Kremlin wall – passes by a small makeshift memorial made of a few buckets with fresh flowers by the sidewalk, handwritten posters, candles, Orthodox icons. A confident man smiling from the photographs. This is the spot where, on the night of Feb. 27, 2015, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down, five bullets to his back, by an Interior Ministry officer subordinate to Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin’s man in Chechnya. While the hired guns have been convicted, no one is really pretending to look higher up the chain of command.
OP-ED
Vladimir Kara-Murza: After years of battling Nemtsov, the Kremlin battles his memory
Flowers surround a portrait of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in Moscow on Feb. 27 at the site where Nemtsov was shot dead.
