Putin’s Rival Was Stalked By FSB Assassination Team Days Before Death: Report

Boris Nemtsov, the late Russian opposition leader and fierce adversary to President Vladimir Putin, was shadowed by the KGB assassination team just days before he was shot dead in 2015, an investigation has found.

Russian agents, including FSB officers Valery Sukharev, Dmitry Sukhinina and Alexey Krivoshchekov, tailed Nemstov at least 13 times between May 2014 and February 2015. However, the agents stopped following Nemtsov on Feb. 17, 2015. He traveled to Yaroslavl without agents shadowing him on Feb. 21 and 22. He was killed by gunshot a week later, according to data obtained by an investigative journalism group, Bellingcat, and its partners BBC and The Insider.

It is unclear why the FSB agents were tailing Nemtsov. However, the squad was linked to subsequent poisoning attempts of the people they had been shadowing. For example, Krivoshchekov, a known FSB operative, was implicated in following and poisoning Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in August 2020.

Additionally, data showed that the FSB squad began tailing Vladimir Kara-Murza when they stopped shadowing Nemtsov. Kara-Murza was also an outspoken critic of Putin and one of the founding members of an initiative aiming to challenge his rule. Among those who followed Kara-Murza was Sukharev.

Between 2015 and 2017, Kara-Murza suffered two medical emergencies. Both emergencies left him in a coma and led to a severe shutdown of his vital functions. Hospital reports and international examinations later confirmed that the incidents were caused by poisoning. The Russian government rejected allegations that its agents were involved in the incident.

Sukharev was also implicated in tailing Russian poet Dmitry Bykov in 2018 and 2019. The poet, who was also an outspoken critic of the Russian president, fell into a coma after he was poisoned in April 2019.

The FSB is responsible for managing any internal political threats on behalf of the Kremlin. The agency also monitors the movements of people across the country, including flight and train reservations, using a database called Magistral. Bellingcat previously used data from Magistral to investigate other assassination attempts in Russia, which led to the discovery of the assassination team. The Russian government has denied the allegations.

"All of this has nothing to do with the Russian government. It looks like another fabrication,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told BBC.