The wife of the jailed Russian-British citizen Vladimir Kara-Murza says she fears every day for her husband’s life on the second anniversary of his arrest, as worries grow that the veteran politician could be the next dissident to die behind bars in Russia.
Kara-Murza, 42, was detained in Moscow on 11 April 2022 and later sentenced to 25 years on treason and other trumped-up charges, in a case that he compared to a Stalinist show trial. At the time of his arrest, he was one of the few prominent opposition figures who chose to stay in Russia, despite friends pleading with him to leave.
Hours before his detention, Kara-Murza appeared on CNN. “This regime that is in power in our country today is not just corrupt, it’s not just kleptocratic, it’s not just authoritarian,” he said. “It is a regime of murderers.”
Like other prominent Russians opposing the war, he was facing imminent arrest for staying in Russia. But Kara-Murza, a softly-spoken intellectual who started as a journalist before turning to politics, decided arrest was the price for being a credible opposition figure in modern Russia. Calling on Russians to protest from the comfort of exile would be seen as hypocritical, he argued.
His wife, Evgenia Kara-Murza, in an interview with the Guardian from London, where she was lobbying for her husband’s release, said: “He believes it was his duty to be in Russia and continue to stand with those who fight the regime. He wanted to share the risks with other Russians bravely fighting Putin’s rule. And he continues to talk about it behind bars.”
Vladimir Kara-Murza was born into a family of scientists, journalists and lawyers with a long track record of dissent against the state. Two of his great-grandfathers were executed during Stalin’s great purges. His mother married an Englishman in the 1990s and moved the young Kara-Murza to England, where he attended Cambridge University and got British citizenship.
Concerns about his already fragile health have been rising since Alexei Navalny’s sudden death in an Arctic prison, which his supporters have pinned on the Kremlin.
Before Kara-Murza’s arrest, he survived what he described as two government attempts to poison him as retaliation for his lobbying efforts to impose US and EU sanctions against Russian officials accused of human rights abuses. In both 2015 and in 2017 he fell into comas after displaying symptoms doctors in Moscow said were consistent with poisoning. Tests at several western labs confirmed this. The attempted poisonings left a lasting mark on his health, with him developing polyneuropathy, a painful condition in which nerves in the extremities slowly die.
Like Navalny, Kara-Murza was moved in January to a high-security prison in Siberia.
Evgenia Kara-Murza said her husband had spent the past six months in isolation in a punishment cell known by its Russian initials as an EPKT. The six-metre-square cell has a single stool, a tiny window covered with bars, and a bed that folds into the wall during the day.
“Their goal is to isolate him from the world. But his spirit remains strong,” she said, adding that in letters he kept his humour and made jokes. “But we are very concerned about his health, which will only deteriorate. He has lost 25kg since his jailing.”
She said Navalny’s death in jail was another reminder that dozens of other ill political prisoners may be at risk of death from deliberate abuse. “As he receives no medical help to tackle polyneuropathy, I believe the Kremlin hopes that one day he’ll just collapse and …” She tailed off, adding: “I fear about his life every day.”
Human rights groups estimate that there are almost 700 political prisoners in Russia, and campaigners say dozens of them may be in mortal danger, struggling with serious pre-existing health conditions.
“We need to get them all out,” said Evgenia Kara-Murza, listing other activists who have struggled in jail with poor health, including Aleksandra Skochilenko, jailed for protesting against the war in Ukraine by replacing supermarket price tags with calls to stop the conflict, and Alexei Gorinov, a Moscow district councillor also jailed for criticising Russia’s invasion.
“Releasing political prisoners should be one of the main conditions that are part of any postwar settlement. But there are people in the prison system who might not make it that far.”
Kara-Murza, who met her husband in Moscow when they were children, has worked tirelessly to spread awareness of his plight, travelling from the family’s US home to European capitals, and urging western leaders to fight for his release.
Last month she met David Cameron, the UK foreign secretary, who on Tuesday marked the anniversary by urging the Russian authorities to “release him immediately on humanitarian grounds”. Cameron said: “We must call out Russia’s callous disregard for his declining health. The victim of two separate poisoning attempts prior to his imprisonment, Mr Kara-Murza is now being subjected to degrading and inhumane conditions in prison, clearly designed to further damage his physical and mental wellbeing.”
There is, however, no easy pathway that leads to Kara-Murza’s release. Friends and family have called on the US and UK to include him in any prisoner swap with Russia that could also involve the jailed American Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and the former US marine Paul Wheelan. But a UK Foreign Office minister in February ruled out a prisoner swap for Kara-Murza, citing Britain’s policy against exchanges that argues swaps only encourage state hostage-taking.
Kara-Murza said she did not know whether there were currently talks that included her husband, but emphasised that the UK government needed to change its position on prisoner swaps.
“In today’s realities this strategy is no longer appropriate,” she said, adding that she believed the policy did not result in fewer British arrests abroad. “We see that whether governments engage or not, the number of hostages and political prisoners is on the rise. The message they are sending is that if you end up arrested, it is your fault. Democratic nations are supposed to fight for their citizens.”
She urged democracies around the world to unite and cooperate to release political prisoners and develop mechanisms that would discourage states from taking western citizens as “hostages.”
While the second anniversary was a grim milestone, she said the day felt as hard as any without her husband.
She last saw him on a on a screen five days after Navalny’s death, when he appeared in a grainy video link from his Siberian jail, issuing a statement of defiance.
“If we submit to despondency and fall into despair, then this is exactly what they’re counting on,” he said. “Our main duty to our dead comrades is that we continue our work, with even greater dedication than before.”
