MOSCOW, July 31 (Reuters) – A court in the Russian capital has ordered the arrest in absentia of the daughter of murdered Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov over her role in an “undesirable organisation,” Moscow’s court service said on Friday.
Zhanna Nemtsova, who left Russia in 2015 in the wake of her father’s killing, is co-founder of the Germany-based Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom, which Russia labelled an “undesirable organisation” in 2024, banning its activities in Russia.
Nemtsova shrugged off the Moscow’s court’s ruling in a post on Facebook: “I’m famous now. The ‘undesirable organisation’ is the Boris Nemtsov Foundation which I set up in Germany in 2015. It is registered in Bonn, where I flew into today,” she wrote.
Russia regularly declares entities it says undermine its constitutional order or national security “undesirable”. People can be jailed for up to five years for funding such activity, or imprisoned for up to six years for organising such work.
Boris Nemtsov, one of President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critics, was shot dead on Feb 27 2015 as he walked across a bridge near the Kremlin. Aged 55, he had been working on a report examining the Russian military’s role in the Ukraine crisis. His killing sent a chill through Russian opposition circles.
A Russian court in 2017 found five Chechen men guilty of killing Nemtsov for a financial reward, but the late politician’s allies said at the time that those who had ordered and organised his murder had not been brought to justice.
(Reporting by Reuters, Writing by Alessandra Prentice Editing by Andrew Osborn)
