AFP – Feb. 27, 2016 – Thousands of Russians prepared Saturday to honour the memory of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov who was gunned down near the Kremlin a year ago in the highest-profile assassination of Vladimir Putin’s rule.

Anti-Kremlin activists urged ordinary Russians to join them on a memorial march through central Moscow, with other commemorative events planned across the country and abroad.
Before the start of the march Russians brought flowers and candles to the bridge near the Kremlin walls where Nemtsov was killed.
US ambassador John Tefft was among those who came to pay respects, laying a wreath with a ribbon saying “From the American people.”
On the eve of the anniversary, lawmaker Dmitry Gudkov, one of the few independent voices in the Russian parliament’s lower house, said he suggested that deputies observe a moment of silence in Nemtsov’s memory but most of his colleagues refused.
Authorities allowed the opposition to hold a march through the city center but forbade activists from marching to the bridge where Nemtsov’s allies have struggled to maintain a makeshift shrine.
“The march in Nemtsov’s memory is also a march demanding a normal country and normal state where contract killings in the form similar to public executions do not take place,” wrote top opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister in the government of Boris Yeltsin, was gunned down shortly before midnight on February 27, 2015, while walking across a bridge a short distance from the Kremlin with his Ukrainian model girlfriend.