2024-08-06 22:36:37
The Russian opposition politician is painfully thin – from stress, he said in an interview with the British broadcaster BBC. V.Kara-Murza still cannot recover after spending more than two years behind bars and was suddenly released.
“It’s a surreal feeling, like I’m watching a movie,” he shared his emotions with the BBC. “But it’s a good movie.” In it, he finally reunited with his family, whom he hadn’t seen since his arrest in Moscow in 2022. April. His youngest son follows him everywhere, not wanting to let him out of his sight.
Kara-Murza, who is also a British citizen, was found guilty of high treason and sentenced to 25 years for his fierce and persistent condemnation of Vladimir Putin and his large-scale invasion of Ukraine.
He spent the last 11 months in solitary confinement, every morning at 5 a.m. was forced to turn up his bed and was only given paper and pen for about an hour a day.
“It’s so easy to lose your mind. You lose the sense of time and space. In fact, everything, he revealed in one of the first long interviews after his release. – You don’t do anything, you don’t talk to anyone, you don’t go anywhere. Day after day, day after day.” He was not allowed to call home, and was only allowed to speak to his children twice in two years.
The additional punishment was even more severe physically.
Almost a decade ago, Kara-Murza nearly died from an unknown toxin and still suffers from the effects, including nerve damage. In September, he now reveals, a prison doctor gave him “a year, 18 months at best” to live if he stayed behind bars.
“After two FSB poisonings, my state of health is not suitable for a maximum security prison,” he grinned.
Last week V. Kara-Murza was one of eight Russian dissidents who disappeared from prisons. As lawyers and relatives sounded the alarm, rumors of a planned exchange began to spread. The prisoners themselves did not know about it.
V. Kara-Murza recalled that when guards broke into his cell in Omsk, he thought he would be “taken out to be shot.” “I actually thought I was going to get shot,” he said.
He was recently ordered to sign a presidential pardon, but refused to beg for clemency from Vladimir Putin, whom he denounces as a “dictator, usurper and murderer.”
V. Kara-Murza was transferred to Moscow and the notorious Lefortovo FSB prison. Five days later, he was taken to a bus and saw other dissidents inside, each with an FSB guard wearing a balaclava. Another guard then took the microphone of the bus and announced that they were being transported for a prisoner exchange, without giving any details.
“No one asked for our consent,” V. Kara-Murza said. “They put us on the plane like animals and flew us out.”
The activist landed in Germany wearing the only civilian clothes he had: black boots, a T-shirt and the slippers he used in the prison shower.
The Russian dissidents were part of a “package” of released political prisoners, along with prominent US citizens such as journalist Evan Gershkovich.
Three of them were former activists in the team of opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who died unexpectedly in prison earlier this year. Initially, A. Navalnas himself had to be part of a complex exchange.
In exchange for the dissidents, Russia received a string of spies and criminals, including Putin’s top prize: an FSB hitman known as Vadim Krasikov, who killed Chechen field commander Zelimkhan Changoshvili in broad daylight in a Berlin park and was imprisoned in Germany.
The judge who sentenced him to life in prison called the killing an act of “state terrorism.”
“Anyone who criticizes this [apsikeitimą], I would like to respectfully urge you to think not about exchanging prisoners, but about saving lives,” said V. Kara-Murza, reacting to the controversy over V. Krasikov’s release. The murderer was greeted at home by a red carpet and a hug from Putin himself.
“Aren’t 16 lives worth the release of one murderer?” V. Kara-Murza asked.
For a long time, Germany was not real. V. Kara-Murza claims that the delay could have cost A. Navalny his life.
The joy of the Kara-Murzai meeting is overshadowed by thoughts about other Russian prisoners who have not been released.
“I’m so happy and overwhelmed that these people are free, but it’s also very sad that so many people were left behind,” said his wife Yevgenia. – I feel guilty.”
Human rights organization Memorial has hundreds of political prisoners on its list and has campaigned intensively for a priority group:
“There are people with serious medical conditions, like Alexei Gorinov, who is missing part of his lung, who don’t have much time.”
Her husband speaks of those “still drowning in Putin’s gulag” and hopes for further prisoner exchanges.
V. Kara-Murza himself became the subject of controversial disputes as soon as he was released. In remarks made shortly after landing in Germany, he said sanctions related to the war in Ukraine should be more targeted and not targeted at “ordinary” Russians.
This immediately caused outrage among Ukrainians. They said his priority once released was to mitigate the punishment of Russia for the war.
V. Kara-Murza calls it calibration.
“I need more information,” he admitted. – I understand that in 2022 February changed a lot.”
But he wants to know why a Russian human rights lawyer can’t go to a conference in the Baltics when a Russian missile with a Western-made chip could hit a residential building in Ukraine.
“The responsibility for what the Putin regime is doing there is shared by the Russian public, a large part of which has chosen to turn a blind eye to abuses and repression,” he said.
“However, let’s not forget the responsibility of those Western countries, which for many years happily communicated with Vladimir Putin and did business, knowing full well who he is and what he represents,” he added.
in 2022 V. Kara-Murza was arrested because he firmly decided to stay in Russia and speak. He is now banned from traveling there and worries about his right to call on the Russians there to act. He thinks he will feel “more constrained.”
But he will continue to condemn the war in Ukraine.
“V. Putin cannot be allowed to win this war. Ukraine must win, and for that to happen, Western countries should support it more,” he said.
Historically, he said, “windows of opportunity” for democratic change open up after a “catastrophic military defeat.”
When his plane took off from Russia, the FSB guard who was next to V. Kara-Murza told him to look out the window.
“He said that this is the last time I see my homeland,” V. Kara-Murza recalled. The activist laughed and added: “I replied that I am a historian, so I am sure I will return to my country. And it will be much faster than you think.”
Parents pay BBC inf.
2024-08-06 22:36:37