"War". How to straighten reality

What is said in the latest public report by Boris Nemtsov

In the office of the Party of the RPR-Parnas on Tuesday, May 12, they presented the report “Putin. War ” - based on the materials collected by Boris Nemtsov. The opposition politician, who was killed in Moscow in February 2015, managed to hold several meetings to prepare this report and write a certain number of requests to the power structures. The report was completed by his party associates, as well as invited economists and journalists. The result was a documentary text with a minimum of epithets and opposition rhetoric; We can say that this is simply a listing of the events of the conflict in the southeast of Ukraine over the past year and a half. Nemtsov’s associates believe that the report would be an excellent material for the future trial against those who unleashed the conflict. The special correspondent of Medusa Andrei Kozenko read the report and tried to understand why it was written.

“The task of the opposition now is enlightenment and the truth. But the truth is that Putin is a war and a crisis. ” In the epigraph of the report - the words of Boris Nemtsov, said by him a month before his death. It is not a secret: Nemtsov (and with him many of his associates) he was very worried that the years of Vladimir Putin’s presidency left them not just without work - in fact, without a profession. For many years in Russia you can not be an opposition and a status politician of a federal scale at the same time. Nemtsov tried to combine work on communal tariffs in the Yaroslavl Regional Duma with the conviction of Putin. He was engaged in conviction from all possible stands; For example, on Facebook - after all, no one has been conducting even intelligible rallies in Moscow for a long time. The investigation of the conflict in the southeast of Ukraine would help Nemtsov feel in demand. He really liked the idea of ​​a report. He conceived it at the end of 2014, began to engage in documents tightly in January 2015. By the end of February, when Nemtsov was shot in Moscow, a lot was already clear with the general concept of the document.

The report was completed by the people close to Nemtsov and the people sympathized with him: members of the RPR-Parnas Ilya Yashin, Olga Shorina and Leonid Martynyuk, economist Sergey Aleksashenko, entrepreneur Alfred Koch, journalists Oleg Kashin, Auder Mujabaev and Ekaterina Vinokurova. The materials were provided by two dozen people.

The previous reports of Nemtsov, dedicated to corruption of people close to Putin or the construction of Olympic facilities, diverged well, but were not quoted very highly. If there were not enough facts in them, opposition rhetoric was turned on - this greatly undermined the trust in the work.

In the current report, 63 pages of text with photos - more than 150 links to journalistic investigations, video materials, sites of state bodies of Russia and Ukraine. There were fewer links in previous reports, and their quality was doubtful (for example, they led in an interview with Nemtsov himself). Thanks to the wide documentary base, a very calm text was obtained - adjusted that it describes the most restless time in the 21st century. Rhetoric in it is less, and at the same time, this is the most clear anti -war statement by the Russian opposition from the very beginning of Ukrainian events.

The report is quite simply structured - the authors in chronology talk about key events of the confrontation. In the first chapter, the authors say that Putin was not enough for Putin in 2012, so the presidential administration thought about strengthening positions. “The scenario of the“ Return of Crimea to Russia ”was undoubtedly planned and carefully prepared by the Russian authorities in advance. The scale of this preparation is obvious today, ”the report says, and perhaps this is his weakest place - nothing is factologically supported. Moreover, the confusion of the political events of the spring of 2014 - the same transfer of a referendum in the Crimea - rather, speaks the opposite.

But the rest of the narrative lies very well on this thesis. The next ten chapters of the report is an attempt to straighten reality. From the screens of TVs, from high stands in 2014, it was lied as much as in the same previous year this century. The task of the authors is a simple presentation of facts with reference to the source. First, Crimea, then the events in the Donbass, the first coffins that came to Russia. The shot down "Boeing". The gradual personalization of the responsibility of the main actors. Finally, the direct and indirect financial losses of Russia - only direct expenses amounted to 53 billion rubles; So much, according to the authors, was worth the content of volunteers along with the operation of military equipment.

The authors pass along the main plot lines of the conflict. The Right Sector (the organization is prohibited in Russia), who overtook the United Russia itself in the Russian media, a pseudo -distributed boy in Slavyansk, the commander of the givi separatists, forcing prisoners of the Ukrainian military to chew their chevrons. “Polish people” go to the Crimea, and the President of Russia in just one year changes his point of view about who they really were; From the official position of emphasized non -interference, he proceeds to confessions - that he made the decision to return Crimea personally, and even led the process.

The largest regret of the authors of the report (and one more, of course, a weak place): it was not possible to really talk with relatives of the soldiers who were in Ukraine. Nemtsov still somehow kept them in the field of view due to personal charm, but with his death the contacts broke off. “If Nemtsov was shot at the walls of the Kremlin, then anything can do anything with our clients in Ivanovo. Nobody will notice, ”the lawyer handed over the position of relatives to the authors of the document.

The report contains certificates of Chechens who fought in the Donbass from power structures, devoted to Ramzan Kadyrov, about the first 200 cargo, the types of weapons that the separatists had, while it was never exported from Russia. In the course of the document, it is generally interesting to observe how secrets of a state scale are breaking up about all sorts of little things. Alternative data are disclosed not due to the outstanding intelligence of the opposition representatives, but at the expense of phones with normal cameras, due to automobile video recorders whose frames are “non -existing” in the Donbass Russian military equipment. Due to the boast of young contractors on social networks - and so on.

According to the results, the small text makes the impression of the comprehensive-albeit short, but about all the main events from the fall of 2013 to the spring of 2015. On the last page-the old, summer of 2014, Nemtsov’s appeal to the soldiers, hardly read by any of them. This is not your war, he said, this is Putin’s war for power and money.

As you read, the conclusion to which the authors lead, it becomes clear quite quickly. But the authors decided to identify it separately: the reports of the report would have looked perfectly in the International Criminal Court, where the current president of Russia would take a place in the bench of the defendants. Nemtsov believed in such a court. As in general, a political outcome for the current opposition.

Andrey Kozenko

Moscow