Ponomarev, now in exile in the U.S, said he feared what could happen if he were still living in Moscow. “I definitely take this personally,” he told me. “I think if I would have stayed inside Russia I could have been in his place.”
Kasparov was also blunt: “The message is this. We have no allergy to blood and anyone can be killed.”
McFaul, who knew Nemtsov personally for 30 years, was shaken up by the murder. He said he remembered once when Nemtsov came to visit him at the ambassadorial residence, and McFaul arranged it so he could drive onto the compound without being stopped by the Russian police at the gate. “When he came in, we chatted and joked about how I was dealing with harassment similar to him,” he remembered.
But the tone of their conversation eventually changed. “As he got ready to leave, he wasn’t joking,” McFaul said. “We watched him drive out with two cars tailing him very deliberately, to make sure he knew they knew where he was and what he was doing.”
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