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’.