On Saturday the Kremlin trotted out a favorite piece of Russian doublespeak to explain the murder of one of its most strident critics. Boris Nemtsov, a leading figure in the opposition to President Vladimir Putin, was shot dead around midnight on Friday a short walk from Red Square, and within hours the state had deemed the killing a provokatsiya, a word whose translation into English, “provocation,” does not begin to capture its ability in Russian to shift blame and manipulate suspicion.
The first one to offer this explanation was Putin, who remarked through his spokesman in the early hours of Saturday …read more
Source: Time
