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The wife of jailed British-Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza has urged the West to step in now to help her husband, fearing what the Kremlin may do to him while he is being treated in a prison hospital.
The 42-year-old face of the Russian opposition to Vladimir Putin, who grew up in London and earned a history degree from the University of Cambridge, is currently being held in a medical facility connected to his Siberian penal colony, having been moved there on 4 July. Evgenia Kara-Murza spent days not knowing where or how he was.
His lawyers had flown in from Moscow but had been denied access to their client in “special regime” prison colony No 7, in Omsk, Siberia on that Thursday morning. They were later told by the prison authorities that he had been moved to the prison hospital, though no explanation was provided for the transfer. But it wouldn’t be until the following Wednesday that his local Omsk lawyer could reach him.
Having spent around 280 days in solitary confinement, in a cell only a few metres long and wide, the move to the hospital, where a prisoner is denied access to their lawyers, had severed Kara-Murza’s final human connection, excluding prison officials and medical staff. Evgenia, his friends, Western officials and human rights activists have described his treatment in solitary confinement as a form of torture, even before the latest move.
Describing the moment she found out her husband had been moved, she said: “I was very scared. You know, we’ve seen this before. Vladimir is a personal enemy of the Russian state. He still has the longest sentence served in modern Russia for political reasons, and his sentence might actually get longer in the coming months, years, because I think that they’re about to open a fourth criminal case against him.
“So, 25 years is not the limit for the Putin regime, and I know how they see him and I see how they treat him.”
As for her own sanity, Evgenia says the nearly week-long ordeal had left her feeling “enraged and sad and frustrated and annoyed and everything at the same time”.
By the time the lawyer reached him in the medical centre, his wife said the usually stoic Kara-Murza was in a “stable” condition but he was “angry”.
“The lawyer says that he’s angry but keeping it under control,” Evgenia says. “Vladimir is being Vladimir. He keeps in good spirits despite everything, of course, but I can only imagine how hard it is for him psychologically.”
Finding out that her husband was in a stable condition was a “small respite from a very long and exhausting marathon”, allowing her to sleep for the first time in a week, but it has not freed her from prevailing concerns about Russian prison hospitals.
“When you think of a hospital, you think of a safe place, right?” she says. “This hospital has nothing to do with what you think of as a hospital.
“He’s still in solitary. And the fact that he says that he’d rather be in his solitary cell at the prison colony of a strict regime, I think says a lot,” Evgenia says.
“Everything else is just as it was at the strict regime prison colony, only now he can barely see his lawyer on top of everything else and I am sure that he’s not being provided actual help.”
Kara-Murza is serving a 25-year sentence for speaking out against Putin’s war in Ukraine – a Moscow court found him guilty of “high treason” – in what is the longest political sentence handed out to a dissident since the fall of the Soviet Union.
The lack of space in solitary confinement or time outside his cell has worsened his polyneuropathy, a nerve condition that affects his ability to feel his extremities, brought on by two failed attempts to assassinate him by poisoning.
And the only other Russian political prisoner who suffered such isolation on account of their opposition to Putin was Alexei Navalny, who died in February from what the Kremlin attributed to “sudden death syndrome” – but which Western nations have blamed on Putin.
Evgenia is receiving promising signs from Western officials that they would like to help with her husband’s case, though in what capacity remains unclear. She met with former foreign secretary David Cameron in March and is expected to meet with his successor David Lammy later this year.
But she has previously said that time is “running out” for her husband, and this mysterious transfer only highlights Russia’s hold on her husband’s life.
“There is no one else, besides the late Navalny, who is not allowed out of solitary for almost a year,” Evgenia says. “So yes, of course, every time he disappears, even for a short period of time, I am extremely worried”.
