Vox Sentences: Boris Nemtsov wasn't a major threat to Vladimir Putin. So why is he dead?

1. "Some sort of nightmare"

People march in memory of Russian opposition leader and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov on March 01, 2015 in central Moscow. (Alexander Aksakov/Getty Images)

• Boris Nemtsov, who served as deputy prime minister of Russia when Boris Yeltsin was president and was a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, was shot to death Friday.

  [Vox / Amanda Taub]

• Nemtsov had been helping plan a large anti-Putin rally in Moscow on Sunday; the rally went forward, mostly as a commemoration of him.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• The march attracted tens of thousands of participants.

  [NYT / Andrew E. Kramer]

• Putin has announced that he, personally, will direct the investigation into Nemtsov's death, so as to leave no doubt the investigation's a sham.

  [Vox / Amanda Taub]

• Nemtsov was an outspoken critic of Putin's policies in Ukraine: "The war between Russia and Ukraine is some sort of a nightmare, a madness that only brings grief, conflicts and problems to all."

  [Kyiv Post / Boris Nemtsov]

• Political scientist Daniel Treisman: "By the mid-2000s, Nemtsov was widely viewed as a spent force. And when the Levada Center polled Russians in 2013, 6 percent approved of his actions, while 48 percent disapproved and 46 percent claimed to know nothing about him."

  [CNN / Daniel Treisman]

• Nemtsov was a free-market liberal, an unpopular position in the wake of the chaos of the 1990s transition from socialism, but he had more of a populist streak than many laissez-faire politicians of that era.

  [WSJ / Gregory White]

• Russian-American reporter Masha Gessen: "In all likelihood no one in the Kremlin actually ordered the killing … The Kremlin has recently created a loose army of avengers who believe they are acting in the country’s best interests, without receiving any explicit instructions."

  [NYT / Masha Gessen]

• Nemtsov joins a long list of Putin enemies who have been assassinated, including journalist Anna Politkovskaya, ex-spy and Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko, human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov, and documentarian Natalya Estemirova.

  [ABC News / Terry Moran]

• Vladimir Gel’man situates the murder in the context of Russia's economic crisis: "The experience of numerous autocratic regimes tell us that when the rulers perceived major threats of public disobedience against the background of a dramatic decline in government performance, the extensive use of political violence against its rivals may become widespread (Argentina in 1976-1983 is a prime example of that)."

  [Washington Post / Vladimir Gel'man]

2. Hit me Bibi one more time

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at the AIPAC conference Monday. (Amos Ben Gershom/Israeli Government Press Office via Getty Images)

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress is tomorrow at 11am.

  [MarketWatch / Robert Schroeder]

• "Nearly three dozen" Democrats are planning on boycotting the speech, which was planned without President Obama's involvement and is taking place two weeks before elections in Israel.

  [Politico / Lauren French]

• Netanyahu defended the speech at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the hawkish pro-Israel pressure group: "My speech is not intended to show any disrespect to President Obama or the esteemed office that he holds … The last thing anyone who cares about Israel, the last thing that I would want, is for Israel to become a partisan issue."

  [NYT / Peter Baker and Julie Hirschfeld Davis]

• The strategic goal of the speech is to equate passing new Iran sanctions with supporting Israel, thereby pressuring Congress to buck the White House on that issue.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• President Obama has said he'd veto new Iran sanctions, as they'd undermine his and Secretary of State John Kerry's attempts to reach a deal with Iran to limit nuclear enrichment.

  [CNN / Jeremy Diamond]

• But Netanyahu has claimed such a deal "could threaten the survival of Israel" and fail to prevent Iran from acquiring a bomb.

  [Jerusalem Post / Benjamin Netanyahu]

• Netanyahu has expresed concern that Iran would use a bomb to destroy Israel; that's unlikely, though a bomb could give Iran cover to more aggressively support anti-Israel terrorism.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

3. Tikrit

Iraqi Army and volunteer fighters launch an operation in Saladin Governorate (of which Tikrit is the capital) against ISIS. (Ali Mohammed/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

• The Iraqi military and Shia militias have begun an offensive to capture Tikrit, Iraq, which has been controlled by ISIS since June.

  [NYT / Omar al-Jawoshy and Tim Arango]

• In total, there are about 30,000 fighters on the government's side.

  [CNN / Ben Wedeman and Mariano Castillo]

• The US is not providing air support.

  [ABC News / Luis Martinez and Martha Raddatz]

• A Shia milita commander told the BBC that the offensive was planned in part by Gen. Qasem Soleimani, who leads the Quds Force, the overseas arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

  [BBC]

• A US official confirmed Soleimani's involvement to ABC.

  [ABC News / Luis Martinez and Martha Raddatz]

• Soleimani's past activities include directing Iran's intervention on behalf of the Assad regime in Syria, coordinating support for Hezbollah, backing anti-US Shia militias in Iraq during the occupation, and "a scheme, in 2011, to hire a Mexican drug cartel to blow up the Saudi Ambassador to the United States as he sat down to eat at a restaurant a few miles from the White House."

  [New Yorker / Dexter Filkins]

• The intervention has prompted fears of revenge killings of Sunnis by Shia in both private militias and the army.

  [The Guardian / Simon Tisdall]

• Last June, ISIS massacred 560 to 770 Iraqi soldiers near Tikrit, raising concerns that Shia fighters will want to respond in kind.

  [AP / Sinan Salaheddin]

4. Misc.

• A massive, 200,000-plus participant meta-study suggests that human intelligence has risen by 20 IQ points since 1950, with particularly large gains in the developing world.

  [BBC / William Kremer]

• 81 percent of Democrats say it's important for the president to have a college degree; 45 percent of Republicans agree.

  [Public Policy Polling]

• But the case that having a college degree actually matters is pretty weak.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• If you want to get a sense of how complicated Obamacare is, imagine what public education would be like if we took the same approach.

  [TaxVox / Eric Toder]

• Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures has one of the most famous album covers of all time. Here's where it came from.

  [Scientific American / Jen Christiansen]

5. Verbatim

• "In Belgium … the likelihood of a first marriage for a woman of reproductive age is now down to 40 percent, and the likelihood of divorce is over 50 percent. This means that in Belgium the odds of getting married and staying married are under one in five."

  [AEI / Nicholas Eberhardt]

• "Currently, there are 3,278 prisoners sentenced to [life without parole] for nonviolent offenses."

  [The Daily Beast / Abby Haglage]

• "Our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts."

  [NYT / Justin McBrayer]

• "Fewer large companies are run by women than by men named John."

  [NYT / Justin Wolfers]

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