Russia: Kara-Murza lawyer visits jailed Kremlin critic

After days without any sign of life, days of guessing, worrying and hoping, Vladimir Kara-Murza's family now at least knows that he is alive, after one of his lawyers was allowed to visit him.

Lawyers had not been able to reach the Russian opposition politician — who is serving a 25-year sentence in the maximum-security IK-6 penal colony in the Siberian city of Omsk — since he was reportedly transferred to a prison hospital and lost contact to the outside world.

After visiting him, his lawyer said that his condition was neither better nor worse than it had been. Kara-Murza's wife Evgenia told DW it was not clear why he had been transferred to the hospital. Evgenia Kara-Murza currently lives in US exile with their three children.

In solitary confinement, locked away from the outside world

Vladimir Kara-Murza survived two medical emergencies after being poisoned in 2015 and 2017. He and his wife blame the Kremlin for both attacks. Evgenia Kara-Murza said her husband has suffered from polyneuropathy, a disease that affects peripheral nerves, ever since.

"I still fear for his health," she said, while leveling serious accusations against the Russian authorities by saying her husband was, after all, put behind bars by the same people who poisoned him.

According to research by the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, the investigative group Bellingcat and the online publication The Insider, Kara-Murza was tailed by members of the Russian secret service in the immediate run-up to the poisonings.

On Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists the Kremlin could not "intervene" in the situation of the imprisoned opposition activist and critic.

Vadim Prokhorov, one of Kara-Murza's lawyers, said the fact that his client had been cut off from the outside world for a week was a violation of all international legal standards. He told DW that Kara-Murza's hospitalization had been unexpected, adding, however, that it was misleading to use the word "hospital" in this case as it is actually a space in "the same prison" and that it also remains unclear what happens to prisoners there.

Prokhorov said Kara-Murza had suffered a great deal of harassment since being imprisoned more than a year ago. He explained that before being transferred he had been kept in solitary since September and that his cell was reportedly no larger than six square meters (ca. 65 square feet).

The lawyer said Kara-Murza's treatment was pure torture. "He gets two glasses of hot water a day and less food than other prisoners. He is only allowed to write for an hour-and-a-half each day. There is a small table next to the bed and a stool with no backrest — nothing else."

700 political prisoners

Prokhorov said such treatment was a "method used against all political prisoners," of which there are an estimated 700 in Russia."The lives of all these people are in danger," said Evgenia Kara-Murza.

Her husband, who holds British and Russian citizenship, drew the ire of Russia's elites in 2012, after he played a decisive role in ensuring that they could be penalized by the US legal system. The US Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, which has since become an important means of imposing sanctions on Russian citizens found to have committed human rights violations or been involved in corruption.

Kara-Murza exposed himself to danger over and over again in the knowledge that he could lose his freedom. When he criticized Russia's war in Ukraine in 2022, he was arrested. In April 2023, he was found guilty of high treason and given a 25-year sentence. Later, he was also charged with spreading "false information" about the Russian army and maintaining links to an "undesirable organization."

'Running away would be a gift to the Kremlin'

Kara-Murza has spent a lot of time in the West over the years, beginning with his days as a student in the British capital, London. Still, despite the risks of returning to Russia, he always did.

"As for me and other oppositionists, running away would be a gift to the Kremlin.That's exactly what they want," he told DW in Moscow three years ago. "Once political activists leave the country, they lose the moral right, the moral authority, to continue their work," he argued.

Though Kara-Murza is one of the Kremlin's most outspoken critics, he is little known in Russia and thus his case has hardly caused a stir. Unlike Alexei Navalny, who drew major crowds, Kara-Murza tended to act more quietly, behind the scenes.

But it would seem that the Kremlin considered both opponents equally dangerous. Navalny because of his popularity among young Russians in particular, and Kara-Murza because of his influence among US lawmakers looking to punish Russia's elites.

This article was originally published in Russian.