TODAY marks two years since jailed British-Russian activist and politician Vladimir Kara-Murza was arrested and detained on bogus charges of “treason”.
UK and US officials told The Sun that he is both deeply unwell and in grave danger – and called for his immediate release before Vladimir Putin gets “more blood on his hands”.
AFPVladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years on trumped-up charges of treason last year following his critique of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine[/caption]
APHe is now believed to be ‘next’ on Putin’s hit list and gravely ill – as UK and US officials told The Sun he must be immediately released[/caption]
AFPThe jailed, but defiant activist has become the new face of anti-Kremlin resistance[/caption]
Last year, Kara-Murza, 42, was jailed for 25 years for “high treason” – marking the longest sentence given to any of Vladimir Putin‘s opponents and one not seen since Stalin’s Russia.
The father-of-three was arrested just weeks after Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine on April 11, 2022 after becoming one of the loudest critics of the war.
Following the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in February inside a hellish Siberian gulag – not dissimilar to the one Kara-Murza is locked up in – fears grew that the jailed Brit would be next.
MP Bob Seely, who is in contact with both Kara-Murza’s and Navalny’s families, called him a “political prisoner” and demanded Russia release him.
He told The Sun: “Vladimir is a brave man making a stand against dictatorship. In a better world, he would be Russia’s future, not someone caged for demanding justice.”
Seely, who chairs the all party parliamentary group on Russia, stated his health “is not good” and that “Putin’s evil regime has twice tried to poison Vladimir Kara-Murza.”
He added: “I call on the Russian authorities to show some humanity and to release him from this political imprisonment, before they have the blood of another Russian on their hands.”
Today, Foreign Secretary David Cameron also called for Russia to immediately release him on “humanitarian grounds”.
In a statement, he declared: “Putin locked him up in a bid to silence him”, adding that he is being subjected to “degrading and inhuman conditions” in jail and is being refused urgent medical treatment.
“The UK will not stand for this abhorrent treatment of one of our citizens. Russia’s depraved treatment of political prisoners must end.”
Kara-Murza’s wife, Evgenia, revealed he is in “grave danger” and being held in a “disciplinary cell” of a “special” regime prison colony close to the Arctic Circle.
Yesterday, she called him a “fierce warrior of human rights” and said he could have never had stood silent in the face of the atrocities committed by the Kremlin.
In an article published by Just Security, Evegenia, who lives in the US with their children, said her husband is “the embodiment of courage”.
HIS ARREST
Kara-Murza, who grew up in the UK and graduated Cambridge, has survived two poisonings that he blames on the Kremlin.
He worked as an opposition politician in Moscow and played an instrumental role in persuading the US to pass landmark sanctions to target corrupt officials and human rights abusers in Russia – including Putin’s inner circle.
The dual British-Russian citizen was a close aide to murdered Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov – who was gunned down by Putin’s assassins in Moscow in 2015.
I call on the Kremlin to immediately and unconditionally release Kara-Murza
US Congressman Jim McGovern
Three months later, Kara-Murza was poisoned and given a 5 per cent chance of survival before learning to walk again. In 2017, a second attack left him in a coma with organ failure.
He now suffers from a permanent and crippling nerve disorder.
Kara-Murza was arrested in April 2022 after returning from talks in Europe and the US where he bravely called Putin a war criminal and denounced his invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian tyrant, 71, outlawed criticisms of the war in March 2022 and began a sweeping and brutal crackdown on dissent and free speech.
Kara-Murza denied all the charges and compared the case against him to a Stalinist show trial.
When he was sentenced last April Navalny – speaking from his own penal colony – called his punishment “unlawful, unconscionable and quite simply fascist”.
The now dead Putin enemy said the draconian sentence “revenge for the fact that he did not die at the chosen time, having survived two poisonings by the Russian FSB.”
Kara-Murza surrounded by Evgenia and his lawyers after recovering from a poisoning in 2017 that left him in critical condition for a week on life support
The activist and politician was arrested shortly after Putin invaded Ukraine for opposing the war and lobbying for sanctions against Moscow
APKara-Murza continued to denounce Putin’s invasion of Ukraine while in Russia at great personal risk[/caption]
The Sun spoke to Evgenia last year who said her husband would never give up his struggle against Putin
‘WE KNOW THE TRUTH’
US Congressman Jim McGovern, who has been fighting for Kara-Murza’s release, said that his imprisonment should “deeply disturb” anyone “who cares about freedom”.
He told The Sun: “Russia charged and convicted him for speaking his mind, for opposing his country’s descent into authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin, and for denouncing the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.”
Rep. McGovern, who is co-chair of the Congressional Human Rights Commission, added: “But we know the truth.
“We know about Putin’s brutal tactics to silence his critics and kill those who oppose him. We know the barbaric conditions of Russia’s prisons—the same prisons that killed Sergei Magnitsky and Alexei Navalny.
“This is why I call on the Kremlin to immediately and unconditionally release Kara-Murza, and I call on my own government to do anything they can to secure his release.”
‘HE IS NEXT’
In the wake of Navalny’s assumed murder at the hands of the Russian state, Kara-Murza bravely blasted Putin a “vengeful coward”.
From his icy Siberian cell, he called on Russians to act against the despot, declaring: “Only Putin – the vengeful, cowardly, greedy old man – still holds on with a death grip, destroying anyone in whom he sees a threat to his power.
“He must be stopped…and only Russian society itself can do this.”
Dr Stepan Stepanenko, head of the Forward Strategy foreign policy think-tank, previously warned The Sun that “it is clear he is next”.
However, he said the grim reality is that “he may even die before he is murdered,” adding that he is “very ill” following the two poisoning attacks.
“Kara-Murza’s battle is not just against his captors but against time itself. He may never reunite with his family.”
In May last year, British financier Bill Browder, who tops the Kremlin’s UK kill-list, called his good friend the “political prisoner Putin fears most”.
He told Time: “If Russia is ever going to be free, it will be led by Vladimir and people like him.”
Facing a quarter-of-a-century behind bars, Kara-Murza asked the world not to forget those who risk their lives to campaign for a free Russia.
He wrote in the Washington Post: “It is my hope that when people in the free world today think and speak about Russia, they will remember not only the war criminals who are sitting in the Kremlin but also those who are standing up to them.
“Because we are Russians, too.”
Foreign Secretary David Cameron said ‘the UK will not stand for this abhorrent treatment of one of our citizens’
EPAThe defiant prisoner has called on Russians to rid their country of Putin[/caption]
The jailed Brit pictured with Evgenia during happier times in Moscow