Twice poisoned and now 25 years in a prison camp

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In Moscow, 41-year-old Vladimir Kara-Mursa, critic of Putin, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison. His alleged crime: high treason! The former journalist with Russian and British passports was arrested at the end of April 2022 for criticizing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A few hours before his arrest, he had said that Russia was ruled by “a regime of murderers”.

Like Sergei Skripal (71), Alexander Litvinenko († 44), Viktor Yushchenko (69) and Alexei Navalny (46), Vladimir Kara-Mursa is one of the poison victims of the Kremlin. Kara-Mursa has even been the target of a poison attack twice.

Poisoned twice

In May 2015, while on a lecture tour for the Kremlin-critical organization Open Russia, he suffered sudden kidney failure after lunch at a Moscow restaurant and vomited. He was rushed to hospital and was in a coma for a week.

At the beginning of February 2017, the whole thing was repeated. He awoke at 4 a.m. with difficulty breathing, tachycardia, and very low blood pressure. Before he passed out, he was able to wake up his in-laws.

Doctors diagnosed serious poisoning by an unknown substance on both occasions. In an interview five years ago, Kara-Mursa told Blick, “All my major organs failed within hours. My chances of survival were five percent.”

In both incidents, Russian authorities refused to open an investigation. The Bellingcat disclosure platform has investigated that Kara-Mursa was overshadowed by members of the FSB poison squad at the time of both attacks. The same department is said to have been involved in the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in August 2020.

Hope for a democratic Russia

Kara-Mursa described the attacks as a “reaction to my years of work in the Russian opposition”. He said in an interview: “I am determined to impose sanctions on the West against individuals – against people of the Putin regime who are involved in corruption or human rights violations.”

At the time, he called on Switzerland, like other countries, to introduce the so-called Magnitsky law, which puts certain people on a blacklist. “Those who are corrupt and violate human rights, for example, should be denied a visa, opening a bank account or buying real estate.”

He described it as “dangerous business” to be an opponent of Putin. Yet he does not give up. “We have to keep going. If we just watch, we make ourselves complicit.” His greatest wish is a democratic Russia with a government that respects the law and the citizens and that becomes a reliable partner internationally.

criticism of Moscow

The verdict of the Moscow court has been criticized worldwide. The German government condemned the court’s ruling “in the strongest possible terms”, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Austrian Volker Türk (58), called for Kara-Mursa’s “immediate release”.

And EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell (75) said the EU stands in solidarity with all Russians who are politically persecuted, arrested or intimidated by the authorities simply because they fight for human rights, speak the truth and criticize the regime.

Source: Blick