Mar 28, 2022 — An investigation by Bellingcat, The Insider and the BBC has now discovered that in the days and months prior to Nemtsov's assassination in 2015.... New doubts also emerge about the impartiality of the official investigation of Nemtsov's 2015 murder.. A large part of the prosecution’s case relied upon DNA comparisons performed by the Criminalistics Institute — the same FSB department that collaborated with Nemtsov’s tailers in the poisoning operations against other opposition figures.... Travel data obtained by Bellingcat shows that Nemtsov was followed on 13 return journeys by FSB officer Valery Sukharev who in each case was accompanied by a second FSB operative. On the first two tailing trips — both to Yaroslavl — Sukharev was accompanied by Dmitry Sukhinin, a newly-uncovered FSB operative who has a background in chemistry and cryptography. On the next 10 overlapping trips — beginning with a 5 July 2014 round-trip to Novosibirsk — Sukharev was accompanied by Alexey Krivoshchekov, another known FSB operative who was subsequently implicated in the operation to poison Alexey Navalny. There is no evidence that Sukharev, Krivoshchekov or Sukhinin were involved in Nemtsov’s murder. The method used to assassinate Nemtsov — shots from a pistol — also differs from the modus operandi later employed by these specialist FSB officers in targeting the likes of Navalny with poison. ... we cannot establish the officers’ whereabouts on the day of the assassination, nor whether they were in communication with the group of convicted Chechens. It is notable, however, that the FSB squad stopped following Nemtsov on 17 February 2015, after an uninterrupted streak of 13 tailing trips. Nemtsov travelled to Yaroslvavl seemingly without a tail between 21 and 22 February. Just one week later he was shot dead.... It would seem implausible that the squad of three operatives from the Directorate for the Protection of the Constitution were tasked with simply tailing and surveilling Nemtsov.... The absence of chemical weapons experts from the Criminalistics Institute on any of the tailing trips for Nemtsov may suggest that the intent was never to poison him or that his routine identified during the tailing trips was unsuitable for such an operation. It is notable that on the initial two tailing trips — both in May 2014 — one of the FSB operatives, Dmitry Sukhinin, was an FSB expert in cryptography and IT. In investigating Navalny’s poisoning Bellingcat discovered that on at least two of his trips — to Kaliningrad in July 2020 and Tomsk in August 2020 — security cameras were disabled and, at least in Kaliningrad surveillance equipment was installed in the hotel room prior to Navalny’s arrival. Travel data also shows that when the FSB squad stopped tailing Nemtsov on his trips out of Moscow, they immediately started following Nemtsov’s protégé Vladimir Kara-Murza. The first instance of a tail on Kara-Murza occurred on 25 February, two days prior to Nemtsov’s murder. Both Nemtsov and Kara-Murza were outspoken critics of the Russian president and founding members of a united opposition initiative that sought to challenge Putin’s rule. The pair were also prominent backers of the Magnitsky Act, a US law that allows the country to sanction human rights abusers internationally and which initially sought to target Russian officials deemed responsible for the mistreatment and death of the whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky. Kara-Murza would initially be followed by members of the Directorate. Among them was Sukharev who was later joined by a chemical weapons expert between 2015 and 2017. During this period Kara-Murza would suffer two medical emergencies, both of which left him in a coma and with severe shutdown of his vital functions. Kara-Murza suspected he had been poisoned as retaliation for his political activities after the Russian authorities declined to initiate criminal proceedings into either case. ... it only became publicly known Kara-Murza had been tailed by members of the Criminalistics Institute and FSB Second Service when Bellingcat and partners reported on the case in February 2021. The full data on Nemtsov’s movements show that he was tailed by the FSB’s Second Service, primarily by Sukharev, between 19 May 2014 and 17 February 2015. https://www.bellingcat.com › news › 2022/03/28 › bori...
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