Who Killed Boris Nemtsov? by Justin Raimondo
▻http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2015/03/01/who-killed-boris-nemtsov
Funny how political murders in the US – the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King – are invariably the work of a “lone nut,” but in Russia it’s always the Putin government. When Dr. David Kelly, a prominent weapons expert and critic of the evidence Whitehall had publicized to justify the Iraq war, committed “suicide” just as he was about to reveal how the British government had doctored up its brief, there were suspicions but these were dismissed as a “conspiracy theory.” An entirely different standard is applied to Russia, and yet, aside from Anglo-American exceptionalism, perhaps there are some good reasons for this. Russia, after all, is a country where contract killings were once a staple of doing business: where gangsterism is widespread, and oligarchs, gorging on the riches of “privatized” companies, are in deadly competition for spoils in a system where government, and not the market, rules.
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Speaking of the murder, Irina Khakamada, who co-founded with Nemtsov the opposition Solidarity Party, while blaming “the climate of intimidation,” also warned that “the murder could herald a dangerous destabilization,” according to Talking Points Memo. “It’s a provocation that is clearly not in Putin’s interests, it’s aimed at rocking the situation.”
This, ironically, is the same line being taken by the Russian authorities, who listed a series of motives for the crime, number one being that the murder was a “provocation” designed to destabilize the Russian state and that Nemtsov was a “sacrificial victim for those who do not shun any method for achieving their political goals."
Putin eerily predicted this possibility in a comment made three years ago when he suggested that his enemies were not above murdering a prominent opposition figure so they could blame it on him.
The truth is likely a bit more prosaic.