Daughter of murdered Putin critic presses U.S. to investigate

Three years after Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down on a bridge in the shadow of the Kremlin, and one day after the plaza in front of the Russian Embassy in Washington was renamed in his honor, his daughter asked the U.S. Congress to help investigate the still-murky details of his murder.

“In the past three years, the Russian authorities have tried to erase the memory of my father and to end the public debate concerning the low quality of the investigation,” Zhanna Nemtsova told the Congressional Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki Commission, on Wednesday. “They have failed. … Today I am asking you to help.”

Under President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, Mr. Nemtsov was seen as a rising political star. But he emerged as a particularly vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin as the former KGB agent gradually consolidated power after coming to office in 2000.

In Moscow on the night of Feb. 27, 2015, Mr. Nemtsov was shot in the back four times while walking home after dining in a restaurant, in a brazen attack that sparked international outrage. His death shocked opposition politicians across Russia and a small memorial near where he was killed has frequently been vandalized at night.

On Wednesday, Ms. Nemtsova told lawmakers that, despite the conviction of a Russian Interior Ministry officer linked to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, her father’s murder case has been widely disputed and the those who ordered the killing remain at large.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has already appointed a special rapporteur to look into the case. On Wednesday Ms. Nemtsova asked the U.S. commission’s chairman Sen. Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican who had met her father more than 20 years ago, for similar assistance to pressure the Kremlin. The panel agreed.

“In Russia, Mr. Putin uses an arsenal of weapons,” said Sen. Ben Cardin, a commission member and the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. “He also uses murder and intimation against his own people and Boris Nemtsov was a victim of that violence.”

On Tuesday in Washington’s embassy district, Mr. Nemtsov’s name was center stage as new Cold War politics played out in a battle over street signs. In what was called a D.C.-sponsored effort to troll the Russian government, a block of Wisconsin Avenue NW where the Russian Embassy is located was renamed “Boris Nemtsov Plaza.”

Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican, teamed up with Washington’s city government, the D.C. Council, to approve the change.

“This serves as an enduring reminder to Vladimir Putin and those who support him that they cannot use murder and intimidation to suppress dissent,” Mr. Rubio told the Associated Press during the unveiling.

This isn’t the first time that Russia has been targeted by provocative street naming. Back in the Cold War days, when the Soviet Embassy was on 16th Street, the city named a portion of the street after dissident Andrei Sakharov.

Recently, Russian politicians suggested retaliating for the D.C. name change by renaming a street outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow — “Severoamerikansky Tupik, 1,” or “North American Dead End, 1.”

• This article is based in part on wire service reports.