The killing of Russian Opposition figure Boris Nemtsov within sight of the Kremlin has exposed rarely seen tensions between different camps inside President Vladimir Putin’s system of rule, political analysts said yesterday.

No outsiders can know with any certainty what is happening behind the red-brick walls of the Kremlin, but some of Nemtsov’s associates say his shooting is being used by one faction to send Putin a message that they are unhappy and need to be reckoned with.

That would represent a challenge to the foundations of Putin’s 15-year-old rule, built on a rigid pyramid of power and the assumption of unshakeable loyalty.

“I think that perhaps Putin, even completely sincerely, was bewildered and even afraid,” Vadim Prokhorov, Nemtsov’s lawyer, said yesterday of the hours after the February 27 shooting.

“Because if you can do that next to the Kremlin, then is it not possible to do it along the route of the presidential motorcade?”

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Who is on which side in this rivalry, or even that such a rivalry exists, is impossible to establish with complete confidence because no one has publicly acknowledged any serious differences between camps.

Yet analysts point to signs of tensions between, on one side, the powerful head of Russia’s Chechnya region, Ramzan Kadyrov, and on the other, the Russian state security agencies which are Putin’s closest associates. Nemtsov, a 55-year-old former deputy prime minister who had become a vocal critic of Putin, was shot dead as he walked home with his girlfriend after dining next to Red Square.

He was the most prominent of a string of Kremlin critics to be killed since Putin came to power; in many cases the gunmen have been jailed but the masterminds remain unidentified.

Flowers and photographs at the site in Moscow where Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov was murdered.

Nemtsov’s supporters said the Putin stands to gain by removing a relentless critic. A timeline of events since Nemtsov was shot points to a tangle of conflicting accounts, confused messages and rival narratives from usually deferential media. That messy picture jars with the meticulous stage management normally associated with the Kremlin.

Kadyrov put forward the theory that Nemtsov was killed by a group of Islamists because he had publicly defended Charlie Hebdo, the French magazine attacked by militants in January for publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.

That version has been contradicted by evidence published in Russian media. One paper said one of the two men charged in the killing, Zaur Dadayev, was tailing Nemtsov months before the January 7 attack on Charlie Hebdo. Nor has Kadyrov’s version of events been backed up by state investigators.

Sergei Sharov-Delaunay, an aide to Nemtsov in the Opposition movement, said he had a number of theories about the motive for the killing, but one is that it was part of an internal power struggle.

“It might have been some group within the authorities trying to put pressure on Putin, to boost their position, to force even more radical scenarios,” he told Reuters.

Kadyrov, the Chechen leader, professes loyalty to Putin but also represents a risk for him.

Kadyrov put down an anti-Moscow insurgency in Chechnya, helping Putin cement his rule. In exchange, Putin gave him a large degree of autonomy to run his region as he chooses.

The arrangement has so far been successful for both men, but some observers say Kadyrov may be overstepping the mark.