A Kremlin-initiated investigation has found the individuals who ordered the murder of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov in 2015, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday during a meeting of the presidential human rights council.
Nemtsov, one of Putin’s most vocal critics, was shot and killed on a bridge near the Kremlin walls in February 2015. A gunman and four accomplices were jailed for up to 20 years in 2017, but Nemtsov’s allies have criticized the investigation for failing to identify those who had ordered the killing.
“In Nemtsov’s murder… everything is clear, the perpetrators and the organizers have been found,” Putin said.
He didn’t name the individuals who were accused of ordering Nemtsov’s assassination.
Nemtsov, who had been deputy prime minister under then-President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, was responsible for a number of reforms in post-Soviet Russia.
Shortly before his death, Nemtsov gave an interview saying that Putin would have him killed because of his position on the conflict with Ukraine.