ALDE, 02.03.2015

Tens of thousands of people joined a rally in Moscow on Sunday in the biggest show of defiance in four years. Members of RPR-PARNAS and YABLOKO, the ALDE Party’s member parties in Russia, joined with many thousands of Russian citizens in the mourning demonstration in memory of Boris Nemtsov. The march has been originally organised to protest against the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Bureau members and party activists of YABLOKO carried banners and laid flowers at the crime scene on Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge. Ahead of the march, YABLOKO adopted a statement which read: “the political responsibility for this crime lies on the authorities and personally on Vladimir Putin, whose launched the war, continue it and holds a propaganda campaign of hatred in support of this war. The moral and humane responsibility is on those who is involved in this campaign”.

They have demanded a competent and impartial investigation of a demonstrative and extremely blatant political murder of Boris Nemtsov: “We consider it necessary for all the true opposition forces to call for a continuing civil and political antiwar campaign. Until the war is terminated – both in Ukraine, and here, inside the Russian society – every political and civil public statement and action should demand this.”

Writing in the Financial Times on Monday, the co-founder of YABLOKO, Grigory Yavlinsky, said Nemtsov was casualty of a wider war: “Boris Nemtsov’s murder, which has shocked Russia, is the result of the war that has been under way for the past year. The war’s location is far broader than the area of military operations in east Ukraine. It covers the whole of Russia and the former USSR. The Kremlin has created a concept of the “Russian world” which has no clear boundaries but encompasses the entire post-Soviet world. The application of this idea is official policy, mingling with the worst elements of public opinion. The war must be stopped. However, the measures that need to be taken to save Russia go far deeper and are far more complex than the end of hostilities. As Mikhail Kasyanov the former prime minister of Russia has observed, since 2008 Russian politics has been characterised by “managed democracy and capitalism for friends, redistribution of property in a very intensive manner and human rights violations”.Opponents of this logic, such as Mr Nemtsov, have dared to call it what it is: annexation, aggression and fratricide. The tragedy of Mr Nemtsov’s murder is how it has made it clear that the war is not only about foreign policy — it is a major domestic problem for Russia, and one that is disfiguring its society.”
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