Prague councillors are to risk the wrath of the Kremlin by renaming a square in front of the Russian embassy after the murdered opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, a vociferous foe of Vladimir Putin.

The Czech capital’s municipal leaders are preparing to honour Nemtsov in a ceremony provisionally scheduled for 27 February, the fifth anniversary of his death, in the currently named Pod Kaštany Náměstí (Under the Chestnuts Square) in the affluent Bubeneč neighbourhood. His daughter Zhanna is expected to attend.

The embassy, in a former mansion once owned by a prominent Jewish banker and later used as the Prague headquarters of the Gestapo, was presented to Stalin by the Czechoslovak government after the second world war in thanks for the Soviet Union’s role in freeing the country from Nazi occupation.

It has drawn attention more recently for its large diplomatic presence, suspected by many as being a front for spying operations on the country, once a cold war ally of Moscow but now a Nato member.

The renaming, likely to be rubber-stamped in a council meeting, follows Washington, Kyiv and Vilnius, which have recognised Nemtsov in a similar way. Kensington and Chelsea council, in London, drew criticism last year after rejecting a proposal to rebrand a footpath outside Russia’s embassy after Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, who was shot dead on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015.

Prague council is also set to name a promenade in Stromovka Park, behind the embassy, after Anna Politkovskaya, an anti-Kremlin journalist who was murdered in 2006.

Prague’s move is likely to reignite tensions with the Russian embassy, which has previously criticised local authority leaders over the treatment of a statue of a decorated Soviet general, Marshal Ivan Konev, after it was reinscribed to qualify his earlier official status as a “saviour” in the second world war, before being covered up to deter vandals.

It has also protested over plans to honour soldiers who served with Gen Andrei Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army, who helped liberate Prague at the end of the war but are considered traitors by the Kremlin because they had earlier turned against the Red Army and fought alongside Germany.

Prague council is also set to name a path in a park behind the Russian embassy after Anna Politkovskaya, an anti-Kremlin journalist who was murdered in 2006. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Prague’s mayor, Zdeněk Hřib, who has previously confronted China over its claim of sovereignty over Taiwan, embraced the move to rename the square after Nemtsov after a petition organised by the Czech Green party and a meeting with Vladimir Kara-Murza, the chairman of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom.

“Our decision is certainly not a random whim,” Hřib, a member of the liberal Pirate party, tweeted. “We are based on long-term incentives for citizens, but of course also on the Czech human rights tradition, which we should not forget.”

Petr Kutílek, a Green party councillor who led the petition movement, dismissed suggestions of “troll diplomacy” aimed at provoking Moscow.

“The Russian government has officially condemned the killing of Boris Nemtsov,” he said. “We are doing this because support for human rights and democracy has been a key priority of Czech foreign policy since Václav Havel became president. It’s been rather weakened in the past seven or eight years.”

Jiří Pehe, the director of New York University in Prague and a Czech political analyst, said the decision had “huge symbolic value”.

“We have a Russian embassy here that’s rather arrogant and has more employees than their embassy in London and who are probably doing things unconnected with diplomacy,” he said. “It’s not easy for a small country to show Russia that it’s not intimidated.”

The Russian embassy was contacted for comment but had not responded by the time of publication.