Putin’s British prisoner: Vladimir Kara-Murza is languishing in a Siberian jail

00:00 06:32

Lisa Haseldine has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Opposing Vladimir Putin is a lethal business. The world was reminded of this last week after the sudden death of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The Russian authorities are blaming Navalny’s demise on ‘sudden death syndrome’, but whether it was outright murder or simply the result of three years spent in Russia’s penal system, the responsibility lies squarely with Putin.

The danger of standing up to Putin is something the Russian-British journalist and author Vladimir Kara-Murza knows only too well. An active campaigner for Russian democracy, Kara-Murza was an ally of Navalny. He is responsible for convincing the West to sanction Putin-friendly oligarchs. In the early 2010s he worked with Boris Nemtsov to introduce the Magnitsky Act in the US and similar legislation across the West. In the past decade, he has survived two suspected poisonings. Last April he was given a 25-year jail term for speaking out against the Ukraine war, the longest sentence handed down to a political prisoner since the collapse of the Soviet Union. With Navalny gone, he has become the Kremlin’s most high-profile detainee.

Kara-Murza was first jailed for criticising the war in 2022, then, at his trial a year later, he was found guilty of spreading ‘false information’ about Russia’s army, participating in an ‘undesirable’ organisation and treason. Russia has since kept him in isolation at a Siberian prison colony in Omsk, and at the end of last month he was secretly moved, resurfacing a day later in a harsher colony close by. It was an alarming 24 hours during which his family and legal team were unable to contact him. He told his lawyer the move was his punishment for refusing to ‘rise’ when asked to by a guard.