Vladimir Kara-Murzasentenced this Monday to 25 years in prison, is a journalist and dissident, a scourge Kremlinwho fought on the side of the opposition from the very beginning of his career and whose desire to return to Russia to change the situation from the inside after the start of the military campaign in Ukraine proved fatal to his future.
Declared a foreign agent by Russian authorities and recognized as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International (AI), he returned to Russia from the United States, where he lived, last year, despite numerous warnings from others about the intensifying crackdown on the opposition and his own negative experience after he survived two poisonings at the age of 41 in 2015 and 2017.
According to the Bellingcat investigative team, Kara-Murza was being followed by the same branch of the Federal Security Service (FSB, formerly the KGB) that later poisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny with a military-grade chemical that turns eight years old. jail.
“If someone wanted to scare us, they succeeded,” said the father Kara-MurzaVladimir, also a journalist, now deceased, comments on the poisonings.
The persecution of an opponent who came into politics at the age of 18 has its roots in the distant past: great-grandfathers Kara-Murza on his father’s side, Latvian diplomats were killed by the NKVD, the forerunner of the Soviet KGB. His grandfather ended up in a concentration camp.
Among his ancestors there is a Tatar aristocrat: his surname is translated as Black Prince.
“Putin must go”
Married with three children, the oppositionist entered politics at the age of 18, where he met the leader of the Russian opposition, Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead in 2015 near Red Square and with whom he worked closely.
In 2003, he was already trying for the first time to get a seat in the State Duma, which the ruling party Russia United didn’t let him.
A few months later, along with Nemtsov, chess player Gary Kasparov, and other politicians, he formed the 2008 Committee: Free Elections, which pushed for free and democratic presidential elections in 2008.
In 2010, Kara-MurzaNemtsov and other opposition forces co-sponsored an appeal entitled “Putin must go,” which anyone could sign on a specific website.
The appeal stated: “At the heart of the socio-political structure that is destroying Russia and which is currently being imposed on the citizens of our country, there is a person who acts as an architect, curator and defender. His name is Vladimir Putin. .”
The petition gathered over 150,000 signatures, but Putin never left power.
Kara-Murza, between exile and return to Russia
The opponent, who wrote opinion pieces for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times, among other media, as well as for the now-defunct radio station Ekho Moskvy and the critical newspaper Novaya Gazeta, soon settled down. in the United States, headed the office of the Russian television company RTVI there. But always returned to Russia. In 2012, he was fired from the network and stripped of his accreditation as a Russian journalist.
From USA Kara-Murza He defended the approval by the US Congress of the so-called Magnitsky Act, which goes after Russians and foreigners accused of corruption and human rights violations. The law, passed in 2012, was originally aimed at Russian officials and others involved in the 2009 murder of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who exposed corruption cases.
The opponent also collaborated with exiled businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Open Russia, an old movement dedicated to protecting civil rights and democracy in Russia.
Between his last poisoning and his arrest in Russia, Kara-Murza He was vice-president of the Free Russia Foundation, also declared an undesirable organization.
After the start of the Russian military campaign in Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, the politician joined the Anti-War Committee, an organization created by businessmen and scientists to support Russians who left the country and collect humanitarian aid for Ukraine.
Returning to Russia Kara-Murza he planned to fight from the inside for a change, though he knew what could happen to him.
Last March, he was in the US and gave a speech in the Arizona House of Representatives about the “Putin regime” and “bombs in residential areas, hospitals and schools.”
At the beginning of April he returned to Russia and on the 11th of the same month, he was arrested and sent to a pre-trial detention center already on charges of discrediting the Armed Forces, to which the charge of treason was later added.
In his last words before the Russian court Kara-Murzawho pleaded not guilty, stressed that he already knew what the verdict would be, but stressed that he had no regrets.
“I blame myself for only one thing: in my years of political activity, I failed to convince a sufficient number of compatriots and politicians from democratic countries of the danger that this poses to Russia and the world is the current regime in the Kremlin. (According to EFE)
Source: RPP
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