Kensington and Chelsea council has provisionally rejected a suggestion to call a footpath in front of the Russian embassy in London to honor the murdered Moscow democracy campaigner and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.
A cross-party institution of MPs requested the Conservative-run council in November to designate the footpath Boris Nemtsov Way. Nemtsov becomes a trenchant critic of Vladimir Putin and a former deputy high minister. He was gunned down in February 2015 on a bridge after the Kremlin. Five Chechens were convicted of the assassination; however, Nemtsov’s circle of relatives accused the Kremlin of a cowl-up and said those who ordered the killing were not introduced to justice. The murder is considered one of a string of Russian political killings that consists of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London with radioactive tea.
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In 2018, Sergei and Yulia Skripal were poisoned in Salisbury with a state-evolved nerve agent. The British authorities blamed Moscow and expelled 23 Russian diplomats suspected of spying. In a letter to Kensington and Chelsea council, the MPs Stephen Kinnock, Mark Pritchard, and Tom Brake said the footpath initiative would “send a robust message [to Moscow] that political assassinations are unacceptable.”
It could display “that the legacy of Boris Nemtsov and the imaginative and prescient of a democratic Russia he fought for a stay on” and that “Britain stands at the facet of freedom and people who protect the guideline of regulation,” they said.
The name exchange could not affect neighborhood postal addresses and could follow the embassy constructing and its consular phase; they made clean. Three world capitals – Washington, Kyiv, and Vilnius – had named streets out of doors their Russian embassies after Nemtsov, the MPs stated, with Ottawa possibly subsequent.
