Paul Goble
Staunton, March 6 – The Kremlin had
no reason to be afraid of the impact of Boris Nemtsov’s conclusion that there
are Russian troops fighting in Ukraine. Despite Moscow’s denials, everyone
knows that is the case. But it did have reason to be worried about the sources
of his information: the mothers of soldiers who fought and died there.
That is because, Moscow commentator
Svetlana Samoylova says, his use of the soldiers’ mothers threatened to win
broader sympathy for their plight and thus to create the basis for a new and
broader anti-war movement in the Russian Federation, something that Vladimir
Putin does not want (politcom.ru/18652.html).
Whether that risk was “a sufficient
basis” for Nemtsov’s murder, of course, is something that is impossible to
know, she says, “for as Yekaterina Schulmann noted in ‘Vedomosti’ there is no
sense in searching for rationality in the actions of those who order and
organize political crimes – they live in a different information field.”
Two days ago, Ilya Yashin, a
colleague of Nemtsov’s, said he would be publishing the report on Russian
troops that his murdered colleague had prepared, and yesterday, the Reuters
news agency, citing Olga Shorina, another Nemtsov co-worker, published several
portions of that study concerning the participation of Russian troops in the fighting
in Ukraine.
Both Shorina and Yashin confirmed
that Nemtsov was preparing to include in his report details of his
conversations with the mothers and other family members of Russian soldiers who
had fought and in some cases died while fighting in Ukraine and thus demonstrate
that Putin is lying when he says there are no Russian troops there.
Samoylova suggests that it is highly
unlikely that the publication of yet another piece of evidence that Moscow has
sent troops into Ukraine would unnerve the Kremlin given how many news outlets
in the Russian Federation have already reported that fact. “However,” she adds,
“in this situation, there is one ‘but.’ And that is
this:
“Nemtsov
was not simply collecting information and preparing an information bomb,” the
commentator says. “He was trying to work directly with mothers and with the
soldiers themselves and thus creating a completely real threat of the socialization
of the problem,” a far more serious development from Putin’s point of view.
“In
other words,” Samoylova argues, the accusation could acquire a face, that of
the soldiers’ mothers, and that face “could elicit sympathy in society and a
sense of injustice” because it would become obvious to all that the Putin
regime was not prepared to show honor and respect to those who had died in its
behalf.
For
Russians, as for other nations, such a sense of injustice could prove far more
powerful than establishing the facts that the Kremlin continues to deny.
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