Council criticised for not getting behind plan to name path at Russian embassy after murdered Putin critic

Kensington and Chelsea council has provisionally rejected a proposal to name a footpath in front of the Russian embassy in London in honour of the murdered Moscow democracy campaigner and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.

A cross-party group of MPs asked the Conservative-run council in November to designate the footpath Boris Nemtsov Way. Nemtsov was a trenchant critic of Vladimir Putin and a former deputy prime minister. He was gunned down in February 2015 on a bridge next to the Kremlin.

Five Chechens were convicted of the assassination but Nemtsov’s family have accused the Kremlin of a cover-up and say those who ordered the killing have not been brought to justice. The murder is one of a string of Russian political killings that includes the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London with radioactive tea.

In 2018, Sergei and Yulia Skripal were poisoned in Salisbury with a state-developed nerve agent. The British government 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 strong message [to Moscow] that political assassinations are unacceptable”.

It would show “that the legacy of Boris Nemtsov and the vision of a democratic Russia he fought for live on”, and that “Britain stands on the side of freedom and those who defend the rule of law”, they said.

The name change would not affect local postal addresses and would apply only to the embassy building and its consular section, they made clear. Three world capitals – Washington, Kiev and Vilnius – had named streets outside their Russian embassies after Nemtsov, the MPs said, with Ottawa likely to be next.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Boris Nemtsov, pictured in 2011. Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

Kensington and Chelsea council’s leader, Elizabeth Campbell, has not yet responded to the letter and a follow-up sent in February.

The council said its officers had raised “potential concerns” about how a name change might affect residents and local businesses. It said it would be happy to consider a formal application and that it had to examine any suggestion “properly and on its merits”.

The planning director, Graham Stallwood, said the council “would be unlikely to support” the proposal because “we have a longstanding policy of keeping our streets free from unnecessary clutter”.

He also cited possible objections from residents and businesses, and “unnecessary confusion for the emergency services”. Street names should have a “sense of place and identity”, he said. “Other than being outside the Russian consulate, I am not aware of a historical link.”

Kinnock described the council’s response as deeply disappointing. He said he suspected other factors may have been at work, including ties between wealthy Russians and the Conservative party. He cited a £160,000 donation made by the wife of one of Putin’s former ministers in 2014 to play tennis with Boris Johnson and David Cameron.

“We need to get to the bottom of why Kensington and Chelsea is refusing to engage,” Kinnock told the Guardian. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist. There seems to be a desire not to upset the applecart. This is despite the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal, the murder of Litvinenko in 2006, and the use of London as a Russian [money-laundering] laundromat.”

Kinnock, who worked for the British Council in St Petersburg, is the only member of the Commons who speaks fluent Russian. He said the footpath would be a “constant reminder” of Nemtsov to Russian diplomats based at the embassy in Bayswater Road. “It’s been done in DC. It can be done here,” he said.

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a former foreign secretary and Kensington and Chelsea’s MP between 2005 and 2015, has expressed support for the plan. He called Nemtsov “a giant of modern Russia” who was “cruelly murdered”. “It’s fitting that we should honour and remember him in London as he is remembered in other world capitals,” he wrote to the council.

Sir Alan Duncan, the Foreign Office minister responsible for Russia, said the UK supported a “fuller investigation” into Nemtsov’s killing. In 2017, the then foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, laid a wreath at the spot in Moscow where Nemtsov was shot six times in the back, Duncan said.

The initiative is the brainchild of Vladimir Kara-Murza, a close friend of Nemtsov and chairman of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom.

Kara-Murza said London had a long tradition of standing up for “what was right”. He pointed to Kensington and Chelsea’s approval of a monument in 1976 to Polish officers murdered in the second world war by Soviet secret police at Katyn – a crime that the Soviet Union denied until its collapse. The council had shown moral courage even though this was politically difficult, Kara-Murza said.

“The Putin government continues to fight the memory of Boris Nemtsov at home. It should not have a similar veto in democratic countries,” he said.

“I hope that the leaders of Kensington and Chelsea will take a position of principle and will not succumb to the worst practices of realpolitik or appeasement.”