Anna Durytska


Anna Durytska is a Ukrainian fashion model., a finalist for Miss Ukraine Universe in 2018. On 27 February 2015, she was the sole eyewitness to the assassination of Boris Nemtsov. Durytska had been in a relationship for over two years with Nemtsov, a leading opposition figure to Vladimir Putin, and Russian military intervention in Ukraine. She was held under house arrest by Russian police following the murder. The Foreign Ministry of Ukraine, stated that it had intervened to secure her release and return from Moscow. Pro-Putin Russian news agencies had claimed that she was forced by Nemtsov to have an abortion in Switzerland, in an attempt to implicate her and the Security Service of Ukraine in the murder.
On returning to Kyiv, Ukraine she went into hiding, under protection of armed guards, assigned to her by the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, after she had received death threats. Pro-Putin news agencies leaked provocative photos of Durytska, in an attempt to discredit her, following which she refused to return to Russia to testify in the trial.
In December 2018, The Guardian republished Durytska's TV Rain interview from the time of her release, in which she called for the street of the Russian Embassy in London to be renamed in memory of Nemtsov. Washington D.C. had previously done so, under the "D.C. Law 22-92 Boris Nemtsov Plaza Designation Act of 2018".
In 2017, she planned to join her friend Ankit Love in London, and attend Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.