The arrest of five men from the North Caucasus in connection with the killing of Boris Nemtsov fitted a well-worn pattern of people from the region being blamed for high profile crimes, such as the murder of the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006. Chechens, feared for centuries in Russia for their supposed brutality, are an easy and familiar scapegoat.
But Ramzan Kadyrov’s intervention, and its markedly different tone from Mr Putin’s condemnation of the murder, throws up some intriguing possibilities. It takes the inquiry into the most high-profile political killing of the Putin era to disturbing new territory.
Possibly, it links the Kremlin directly to the murder, via Mr Kadyrov. Or it could suggest that Mr Putin’s power has weakened to a degree where Mr Kadyrov felt that he could get away with settling a personal score on Kremlin turf without consulting him, which would be a landmark development.
It could also be that the killer or killers acted alone or as hired hands without either Mr Kadyrov or Mr Putin’s knowledge, although many of those who were closest to Nemtsov say that it is impossible that, given the location, the security forces were not involved in some way.
Within hours of his death, investigators and state media were floating the idea that Nemtsov had been murdered by a Muslim.
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Mr Kadyrov has positioned himself as the political head of Russian Islam. Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre said before the murder that he was also “Putin’s irregular fighter” with “a licence to say and do things no one else has” and to do them “without having to clear them with anyone in advance.”
These twin roles, and his thuggish charisma, give the 38-year-old a clout out of all proportion to the one million Chechens that he rules over.
We may be about to discover just how far that clout stretches.