Details start to emerge about Boris Nemtsov’s unfinished report on Ukraine

Russian opposition activist Ilya Yashin, an ally of the slain politician Boris Nemtsov, has revealed some of the details of Nemtsov’s unfinished report on Russian military activity in eastern Ukraine.

Writing on Facebook, Yashin said the government paid 3 million rubles (about $50,000) to each of the families of the Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine allegedly while on vacation in the summer of 2014. In exchange for the cash, the families supposedly signed a nondisclosure agreement that threatens criminal penalties if they break the deal. This is precisely why the soldiers’ relatives, Yashin says, refuse to talk to reporters.

According to Nemtsov’s sources, Yashin says, the families of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine in January and February 2015, however, received no compensation at all. (Unlike the summer 2014 scheme, these Russian soldiers supposedly quit the armed forces outright before going to Ukraine, rather than fighting “while on vacation.”) Despite the lack of state support, these families are still afraid to talk to journalists, especially after Nemtsov’s murder, Yashin says.

A finished version of Nemtsov’s report will be published posthumously in April.

In practice, relatives [of the soldiers killed in Ukraine] didn’t receive any compensation this time [in January and February 2015]. Authorities shrugged and sent them up the chain of command. Seeking compensation officially was impossible, however, as the soldiers had formally quit the Russian military before being killed.

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• On March 5, Reuters published a note from Nemtsov reading, “I was contacted by paratroopers from Ivanovo. 17 killed. The [families of the] paratroopers aren’t receiving any compensation, but they’re still afraid to talk.” A day earlier, Yashin had tweeted the same text, with the name of the city redacted.
• Reports of the Russian military’s participation in the conflict in eastern Ukraine regularly appear in the media. Some of the earliest, most visible evidence emerged in August 2014, when journalists learned of several paratroopers being buried after supposedly dying in combat in Ukraine. The Russian government denies this information.
• Boris Nemtsov was shot and killed on February 27 in Moscow, just minutes from the Kremlin. He died before he finished a report on Russian military operations in Ukraine. Nemtsov had published several earlier reports detailing what he believed to be corruption in contemporary Russian politics.