Boris Nemtsov, leading Putin critic, shot and killed in Moscow

[red_elk]

I like the look of Radio Free Europe.

But how come it doesn't feature any news from my area?

It was created as a Cold War anti-Soviet propaganda outlet, for broadcasting on Soviet territory, in Russian language. Now switched to anti-Russian agenda.

They were founded as an anti-communist news source in 1949 by the National Committee for a Free Europe, as part of a large-scale Psychological Operation during the Cold War. RFE/RL received funds from the Central Intelligence Agency until 1972.[5] During the earliest years of Radio Free Europe's existence, the CIA and the U.S. Department of State issued broad policy directives, and a system evolved where broadcast policy was determined through negotiation among the CIA, the U.S. State Department, and RFE staff

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Liberty

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

I have seen some RFE stuff on Czech TV and was shocked that these people apparently think that more freedom can be achieved through propaganda.

 

[Rashiminos]

Meanwhile, president Putin has sent a letter to the NYT warning against actions outside of the UNSC and a "possible strike" against Syria, as this will endanger the fabric of the United Nations.

As far as is known, the US are not contemplating such a strike.

All of the red line discussions were just talk, yes? (The US doesn't make military threats without plans to back them, nor do they lack for time to contemplate a vast number of hypothetical scenarios).

Perhaps Mr Putin is confusing the airstrikes against IS positions (which have been unofficially condoned by Syria's president Assad) with a strike against Syria?

This is some speculation about "accidents" going on when it comes to hitting IS positions.

"Newtsov murder doesn't discrdit him, but the idea that Putin tacitly or explicitly condoned the murder would imply discrediting Netsov?"

The former: An observation that Nemtsov's death increases suspicion and criticism (verifiable from posters in thread) of Putin or members of the Kremlin. The latter: The typical motive assigned to Putin or members of the Kremlin for conspiring to kill Nemtsov. Apply modus tollens.

Since Nemtsov is a Russian politcian being murdered in Russia, what do other politicians being murdered in other countries have to do with Nemtsov's murder?

An abstract analogy for third party involvement in killings.

What is quite clear to anyone following the news is that Nemtsov received several death thread,

Yes, this is clear.

to which the police saw no reason to respond in any way.

No, this isn't clear. Could be refuted with some citation of Nemtsov requesting protection from Russian authorities and being refused. (Possibly by you finding said source and linking it).

Since he was subsequently assassinated, it also seems rather clear that these death threats were serious.

Hindsight.

Perhaps you'd like to suggest that Nemtsov was in part guilty to being murdered by failing to obtain 'protection'?

Guilty? No. Naive? Possibly. Bodyguards are not a new idea (or necessarily undemocratic ).

It seems to me it would be more of a priority to Russia to ensure that political opponents and journalists can do what they are supposed to do in a democracy without thread of assassination or being prosecuted on trumped up charges.

Criminal corruption tends to undermine democracy in those ways, as well as missions that can fly under cover of criminal corruption. It's not simple to remove corruption when the tools for doing so are themselves corrupted.

Spoiler :

We probably have differing opinions on whether the inability to quickly resolve corruption is a result of unwillingness or lack of control.

 

[Agent327]

http://www.rferl.org/content/suicide-homicide-ukraine-officials/26888375.html

Suspicious deaths in Ukraine

No news on China?

All of the red line discussions were just talk, yes? (The US doesn't make military threats without plans to back them, nor do they lack for time to contemplate a vast number of hypothetical scenarios).

Does this invalidate my statement?

This is some speculation about "accidents" going on when it comes to hitting IS positions.

No, it is not.

The former: An observation that Nemtsov's death increases suspicion and criticism (verifiable from posters in thread) of Putin or members of the Kremlin. The latter: The typical motive assigned to Putin or members of the Kremlin for conspiring to kill Nemtsov. Apply modus tollens.

"Newtsov murder doesn't discrdit him, but the idea that Putin tacitly or explicitly condoned the murder would imply discrediting Netsov?"

The former isn't 'an observation', it's an illogical statement. As is the latter. So, basically, two logical fallacies in a row.

An abstract analogy for third party involvement in killings.

So, basically, they're a bit irrelevant. And completely irrelevant to the investigation, which should be about actual evidence.

No, this isn't clear. Could be refuted with some citation of Nemtsov requesting protection from Russian authorities and being refused. (Possibly by you finding said source and linking it).

As said, this was from the original report of the Nemtsov murder. Feel free to ignore it was mentioned.

Guilty? No. Naive? Possibly. Bodyguards are not a new idea (or necessarily undemocratic ).

Another logical fallacy: if the police choose to ignore death threats, why would Netsov have to take them seriously. Either death threats are to be taken serious, or they are not. The police chose to ignore them and were proven wrong to do so. (You earlier argued Netwsov was not a prominent politican; do you expect every non-prominent politician to walk around with body guards after receiving death threats?) Nemtsov was not naive enough to not report death threats. It would seem if any naivity was involved, it was on the part of the police.

Criminal corruption tends to undermine democracy in those ways, as well as missions that can fly under cover of criminal corruption. It's not simple to remove corruption when the tools for doing so are themselves corrupted.

Indeed.

 

[Yeekim]

Now, Putin himself has been missing from public for a week.
Speculations abound.

 

[Rashiminos]

Does this invalidate my statement?

The one about the United States "not contemplating a strike on Syria?" Yes, it does.

No, it is not.

I guess I could have clarified who was speculating: Russian government/intelligence.

"Newtsov murder doesn't discrdit him, but the idea that Putin tacitly or explicitly condoned the murder would imply discrediting Netsov?"

The former isn't 'an observation', it's an illogical statement. As is the latter. So, basically, two logical fallacies in a row.

"Illogical": I don't think that word means what you think it means. It's not enough to simply call them fallacies because you want them to be. (Maybe you could discuss the effect Nemtsov's death had on the opinions concerning the Russian government, and how, hypothetically, Putin and/or some faction in the Kremlin would have had him murdered to manage those perceptions?)

Spoiler :

As a side note: You would think that someone would bother to correct his own spellings when quoting himself.

So, basically, they're a bit irrelevant. And completely irrelevant to the investigation, which should be about actual evidence.

For which they still have to discover a reasonable explanation to fit that evidence.

As said, this was from the original report of the Nemtsov murder. Feel free to ignore it was mentioned.

The OP of the thread doesn't mention it, and it would be harder for me to ignore, if by chance, someone were to link it in this thread somewhere (or, if it had already been linked, a brief reminder on where I might find it).

Another logical fallacy: if the police choose to ignore death threats, why would Netsov have to take them seriously.

Maybe he didn't trust the police? It's all fine to complain about the "rule of law" in Russia, but then you suggest the police's opinion was good enough for Nemtsov when the police are tools of the state?

Either death threats are to be taken serious, or they are not.

And we have more than one party that can decide whether to take them seriously.

The police chose to ignore them and were proven wrong to do so.

Again, link showing that police "ignored" the threats required.

(You earlier argued Netwsov was not a prominent politican; do you expect every non-prominent politician to walk around with body guards after receiving death threats?)

No. There would seem to evidence (or sample data ) against that expectation. Maybe you should rephrase the question to get the answer you wanted me to make (if I think they should, for instance).

Nemtsov was not naive enough to not report death threats.

Never claimed he did not report...

It would seem if any naivity was involved, it was on the part of the police.

There was possibly some naivete from the police. If so, why leave one's protection in their hands?

 

[red_elk]

The OP of the thread doesn't mention it, and it would be harder for me to ignore, if by chance, someone were to link it in this thread somewhere (or, if it had already been linked, a brief reminder on where I might find it).

According to investigators, he was receiving threats because of his position in regards to Charlie Hebdo events.
That's all.
There are no messages about "death threats" or that he reported them to police, or that he took threats seriously and was seeking protection.

 

[REDY]

I have seen some RFE stuff on Czech TV and was shocked that these people apparently think that more freedom can be achieved through propaganda.

Ask your parents where they were getting valid news.

BTW for fun(?) (Czech only)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeY1XPnoPD4

I put this link also because its reliable source on this topic.

 

[Agent327]

A recently published book sheds some interesting light on the recent Nemtsov murder:

Red Notice

The grandson of the head of the American Communist Party commits the ultimate act of rebellion: He gets a business degree from Stanford. From there, he goes on to build the biggest hedge fund in Russia. After exposing widespread government corruption, he gets expelled from the country. While he’s gone, the Kremlin raids his fund and perpetrates an elaborate financial fraud. The lawyer investigating the crime is tortured and dies in prison. He avenges his lawyer’s death, exposing a cover-up at the highest levels of the Putin regime.

Here’s the craziest part: It’s all true, as told by that Stanford M.B.A., Bill Browder, in his new memoir, “Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice.” It’s a riveting account — and really, how could it not be? — marred only by Browder’s perhaps justifiable but nevertheless grating sense of self-importance.

A cocksure math whiz, Browder rebels against his lefty family — his grandfather Earl Browder twice ran for president on the Communist ticket — by embracing capitalism. Even so, his affection for his grandfather runs so deep that when his boss at a consulting firm asks him where he would like to be posted, he says Eastern Europe.

So in 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Browder found himself on assignment in Poland, where the government had begun privatizing state-owned companies and selling their shares at ridiculously low valuations. It was his light-bulb moment. “I now knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life,” he writes.

The first third of “Red Notice” recounts the engrossing tale of Browder’s rise to the top of the financial world. Descriptions of his early jobs working for the disgraced financier Robert Maxwell and the highflying bank Salomon Brothers are among the book’s most entertaining sections. Browder is a keen observer of Wall Street culture with a gift for making complex financial investments understandable. You find yourself cheering along as he earns a fortune investing in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, even as he beats his chest after each winning bet. “In a short time, our $25 million portfolio was transformed into $125 million,” he writes. “We had made $100 million!”

Browder soon begins to bump up against rapacious oligarchs and crooked management. But rather than exit the country, like many disillusioned American investors, Browder wages a campaign to clean up Russian capitalism and expose its underbelly. In 2005, the Kremlin bars him from Russia, his assets are misappropriated and one of his lawyers, Sergei Magnitsky, is imprisoned and dies after being beaten by eight riot guards.

Unbowed, Browder punches back. He persuades Congress to pass a law in 2012 imposing sanctions against Russian officials said to be responsible for Magnitsky’s death. His actions drive the Kremlin berserk, and Putin retaliates by signing into law a ban on Americans’ adopting Russian orphans. There is a warrant out for Browder’s arrest in Russia, and he believes there is a real chance that Putin will have him killed.

No doubt, last month’s murder of the Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov has surely heightened that fear. Nemtsov had championed Browder’s crusade, traveling to Washington to call on the American government to establish sanctions.

“Previously, the Putin regime relied primarily on imprisonment and exile to silence opposition politicians,” Browder said in a statement issued after Nemtsov’s death. “Now, they have started murdering them. I’m sure this won’t be the last.”

The narrative in “Red Notice” moves along briskly, and Browder’s prose is clean. But as he morphs from iconoclastic investor to political crusader, Browder becomes less likable. At times, he is not his own best protagonist and too frequently lapses into off-putting self-aggrandizement when discussing his accomplishments.

He describes his testimony before a United States House committee. “As I spoke, I noticed that the fresh-faced staffers had stopped tapping away at their BlackBerrys,” he writes, and after he finished “several people in the room had tears in their eyes.” He recalls a human rights panel discussion with Tom Stoppard and Bianca Jagger. “I’d planned to say more, but was cut off by an outburst of applause,” he writes. “One by one, people rose from their seats, and before I knew it, everyone was standing.”

“Red Notice” isn’t the first time Browder has told his tale. He was featured on “60 Minutes” last year, and this newspaper and numerous others have profiled him. Browder acknowledges using the media to help both his investments and his quest for justice, but he also appears to relish the attention, even while it comes at great personal risk. Though he has dedicated his life’s work and this compelling book to his deceased lawyer, make no mistake: Bill Browder is the hero of his own story.

RED NOTICE

A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

By Bill Browder

Illustrated. 396 pp. Simon & Schuster. $28.

Peter Lattman is a business editor at The Times.

From the NYT Sunday Books Review special Money http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/review/index.html?8qa

 

[Agent327]

A recently published book sheds some interesting light on the Nemtsov murder:

Red Notice

The grandson of the head of the American Communist Party commits the ultimate act of rebellion: He gets a business degree from Stanford. From there, he goes on to build the biggest hedge fund in Russia. After exposing widespread government corruption, he gets expelled from the country. While he’s gone, the Kremlin raids his fund and perpetrates an elaborate financial fraud. The lawyer investigating the crime is tortured and dies in prison. He avenges his lawyer’s death, exposing a cover-up at the highest levels of the Putin regime.

Here’s the craziest part: It’s all true, as told by that Stanford M.B.A., Bill Browder, in his new memoir, “Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice.” It’s a riveting account — and really, how could it not be? — marred only by Browder’s perhaps justifiable but nevertheless grating sense of self-importance.

A cocksure math whiz, Browder rebels against his lefty family — his grandfather Earl Browder twice ran for president on the Communist ticket — by embracing capitalism. Even so, his affection for his grandfather runs so deep that when his boss at a consulting firm asks him where he would like to be posted, he says Eastern Europe.

So in 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Browder found himself on assignment in Poland, where the government had begun privatizing state-owned companies and selling their shares at ridiculously low valuations. It was his light-bulb moment. “I now knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life,” he writes.

The first third of “Red Notice” recounts the engrossing tale of Browder’s rise to the top of the financial world. Descriptions of his early jobs working for the disgraced financier Robert Maxwell and the highflying bank Salomon Brothers are among the book’s most entertaining sections. Browder is a keen observer of Wall Street culture with a gift for making complex financial investments understandable. You find yourself cheering along as he earns a fortune investing in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, even as he beats his chest after each winning bet. “In a short time, our $25 million portfolio was transformed into $125 million,” he writes. “We had made $100 million!”

Browder soon begins to bump up against rapacious oligarchs and crooked management. But rather than exit the country, like many disillusioned American investors, Browder wages a campaign to clean up Russian capitalism and expose its underbelly. In 2005, the Kremlin bars him from Russia, his assets are misappropriated and one of his lawyers, Sergei Magnitsky, is imprisoned and dies after being beaten by eight riot guards.*

Unbowed, Browder punches back. He persuades Congress to pass a law in 2012 imposing sanctions against Russian officials said to be responsible for Magnitsky’s death. His actions drive the Kremlin berserk, and Putin retaliates by signing into law a ban on Americans’ adopting Russian orphans. There is a warrant out for Browder’s arrest in Russia, and he believes there is a real chance that Putin will have him killed.

No doubt, last month’s murder of the Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov has surely heightened that fear. Nemtsov had championed Browder’s crusade, traveling to Washington to call on the American government to establish sanctions.

“Previously, the Putin regime relied primarily on imprisonment and exile to silence opposition politicians,” Browder said in a statement issued after Nemtsov’s death. “Now, they have started murdering them. I’m sure this won’t be the last.”

The narrative in “Red Notice” moves along briskly, and Browder’s prose is clean. But as he morphs from iconoclastic investor to political crusader, Browder becomes less likable. At times, he is not his own best protagonist and too frequently lapses into off-putting self-aggrandizement when discussing his accomplishments.

He describes his testimony before a United States House committee. “As I spoke, I noticed that the fresh-faced staffers had stopped tapping away at their BlackBerrys,” he writes, and after he finished “several people in the room had tears in their eyes.” He recalls a human rights panel discussion with Tom Stoppard and Bianca Jagger. “I’d planned to say more, but was cut off by an outburst of applause,” he writes. “One by one, people rose from their seats, and before I knew it, everyone was standing.”

“Red Notice” isn’t the first time Browder has told his tale. He was featured on “60 Minutes” last year, and this newspaper and numerous others have profiled him. Browder acknowledges using the media to help both his investments and his quest for justice, but he also appears to relish the attention, even while it comes at great personal risk. Though he has dedicated his life’s work and this compelling book to his deceased lawyer, make no mistake: Bill Browder is the hero of his own story.

RED NOTICE

A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

By Bill Browder

Illustrated. 396 pp. Simon & Schuster. $28.

Peter Lattman is a business editor at The Times.

From the NYT Sunday Book Review's special on Money: http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/...nday Book Review&region=TopBar&pgtype=article

* In addition to being prosecuted after having died in prison the Kremlin apparently still wasn't satisfied with the result:

Sergei Magnitsky - the final insult: Russia continues to 'desecrate the memory' of the whistleblower lawyer

First he was imprisoned. There he died after being denied medical treatment. Then he was put on posthumous trial. Now the Russian lawyer who dared to expose a £140m fraud is accused of perpetrating the crime himself

Russian investigators have opened a second posthumous criminal investigation into the whistleblower lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who exposed an alleged £140m fraud by Moscow tax officials, it was claimed.

Mr Magnitsky, who died in a Russian prison in 2009 after suffering beatings and being deprived of medical treatment, became the first dead person to be put on trial in modern Russia when he was last year convicted of tax fraud in proceedings described by critics as evidence of “Sovietisation”. The Kremlin denied the prosecution was an act of revenge to distract attention from corrupt officials but supporters said a further criminal investigation has now come to light, this time accusing Mr Magnitsky of the massive theft which he had himself uncovered.

The death of the 37-year-old auditor opened a new rift between Moscow and Washington, which passed a “Magnitsky Act” banning nearly 20 Russian officials implicated in the lawyer’s death from the United States and threatening to add more senior figures to the list.

Bill Browder, the British-American financier who employed Mr Magnitsky and has since led the campaign to expose corruption in Russia, said that the lawyer had now been named as the ringleader of four suspects accused of masterminding the $230m (£140m) tax refund theft.

Campaigners said the investigation, disclosed in official papers obtained on behalf of the Magnitsky family, belied efforts by President Vladimir Putin to improve Russia’s international standing ahead of next month’s Winter Olympics by releasing prisoners including the former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and members of the feminist punk band Riot.

Mr Browder, who runs the London-based investment house Hermitage Capital, said: “If the Russian authorities are steadfastly prosecuting a dead man four years after they killed him, any talk about a Putin thaw from his well-publicised amnesty should be discarded as cynical trash. Everything one needs to know about the real state of justice in Russia can be seen in how Magnitsky’s killers have all gone free and the state continues to desecrate his memory and terrorise his family.”

An official at the heart of the case, Olga Stepanova, who was in charge of the Moscow tax office claimed by Mr Magnitsky to have been at the heart of the alleged fraud, was recently told she will not be prosecuted. Despite evidence of enrichment among officials and investigators linked to the case, no-one has faced charges relating to the lawyer’s death.

The Russian interior ministry carefully denied that the investigation, which appears to have been opened about a year ago but has only now come to light, was a “new” attempt to prosecute Mr Magnitsky, insisting it was not “common practice” in the country to try dead people.

A spokesman told the RIA Novosti news agency: “The information does not correspond to reality. The Interior Ministry’s investigative department... have not started new criminal cases against Magnitsky. There is no such practice in the Russian Federation as instigating criminal cases against dead people.”

The Magnitsky case has proved an international liability for Mr Putin ever since the tax lawyer first uncovered evidence that materials seized from Hermitage Capital’s Russian companies in 2007 were used by an organised crime cartel to take over the subsidiaries and then fraudulently claim the largest tax refund in Russian history.

Mr Magnitsky was arrested in 2008 by the same tax investigators he had accused of complicity in the fraud and held without trial for 11 months. He developed pancreatitis, gall stones and a linked condition for which he was supposed to undergo an operation that never took place. His death in November 2009 came days before the expiry of the 12-month limit on holding suspects without charge. On the eve of his death, he was left untreated in Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina prison after allegedly being severely beaten by staff.

In the first posthumous case against him, Mr Magnitsky was convicted along with Mr Browder to have evaded taxes owed by Hermitage Capital, resulting in a nine-year prison term in absentia for the financier, who has denied any wrongdoing, and a refusal by the Russian courts to rehabilitate the lawyer. Under Russian law, posthumous trials are banned unless the proceedings are brought by the relatives of the deceased with the aim of clearing his or her name.

The new case states that Mr Magnitsky had “organised by deceit” the tax refund and “stolen funds from the budget of the Russian Federation and of Moscow City”.

It came to light after Mr Magnitsky’s family filed a complaint to gain access to documents relating to his case which have been withheld by the Russian courts.

Mr Browder said Russian denials of the existence of the new criminal case were motivated by a desire to avoid damaging headlines in the weeks before the winter games in Sochi

From: http://www.independent.co.uk/incomi...mory-of-the-whistleblower-lawyer-9057334.html

 

[plarq]

Ex-commie against ex-commie, great.

 

[FriendlyFire]

According to investigators, he was receiving threats because of his position in regards to Charlie Hebdo events.
That's all.
There are no messages about "death threats" or that he reported them to police, or that he took threats seriously and was seeking protection.

Better call the NKVD to protect you from Stalin.
Its not like western media has numerous interviews of Nemtsov saying he feared for hes life, including widely reported Kremlin "Death list" for opponents of Putin.
How many murdered journalist, poisoned Ukrainian presidents and dead opposition dose it take ?