Yevgeniya Kara-Mursa has not seen her husband since April. That's the longest time in the twenty years they've been a couple, the Russian says in a conversation in Berlin. Her husband is opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Mursa. He has been in custody since April and has been in a solitary cell in a high-security wing of a Moscow prison for the past few months.Vladimir Kara-Mursa: Putin's opponents are not giving upKara-Musa campaigned for the Magnitsky Act to be passed in the United States. This is a law that allows foreign government officials to have their assets frozen for human rights violations and denied entry to the United States. Similar laws were passed in numerous states based on the American example. In addition, Kara-Mursa survived two suspected poison attacks.
The first criminal case against Kara-Mursa was launched in April for spreading "fake information about the Russian armed forces". There is a risk of between three and ten years imprisonment. The allegation related to a speech by Kara-Mursa in the Arizona state legislature in mid-March, in which he discussed Putin's war crimes in Ukraine. In the summer, the opposition figure was charged with collaborating with an “undesirable organization” after attending a Sakharov Center conference on support for political prisoners the previous year.
According to his wife, the latest allegation of treason is based on three public speeches by her husband, all of which are available on YouTube on the Internet. One speech he gave was at a NATO event, the second before the American Congress and the third before the Norwegian Helsinki Committee. At the court hearings in Moscow, reporters and diplomats were not allowed into the courtroom and the hearing took place behind closed doors. Yevgenia Kara-Murza is expecting a long sentence in a camp that will probably be far outside of Moscow. This is how action was taken against the well-known opposition leader Alexei Navalnyj .
A week in a coma
Another fate connects Kara-Mursa with Navalnyj . Both are victims of poisoning. In May 2015, Kara-Mursa's kidneys failed, and the opposition figure was in a coma for a week. Doctors diagnosed severe poisoning, later heavy metal residues were diagnosed. Since this alleged attack, Evgeniya Kara-Mursa has been living in the United States with her three children for security reasons.
Almost two years after the first collapse with multiple organ failure, Kara-Mursa was poisoned again in February 2017. The American FBI investigated the case and spoke of an attack "with a biochemical weapon," says Yevgenia Kara-Mursa. But the FBI only releases a few documents on the case that have been blacked out in many places. According to research by the Bellingcat platform, Kara-Mursa was shadowed by employees of the FSB secret service before the poisoning, who later also targeted Navalny, who was poisoned in August 2020.
Like Navalny, her husband refused to leave Russia despite these dangers. "He was of the opinion that as a Russian politician he could not work from a safe distance, but that he had to take the same risks as other members of the opposition," says Yevgenia Kara-Mursa. "Now he is in the hands of the people who wanted to kill him twice." She is not a politician, hardly a human rights activist. But now that her husband has become a political prisoner, she sees it as her duty to continue his cause.
As long as Putin is in power, there will be war, she says. The West has long underestimated that internal oppression leads to external aggression. That's why Putin "got away with his wars and murders." Now the West must do everything to ensure that Ukraine wins the war. With Putin there will be no change for the better in Russia. "The Putin system must be destroyed so that another Russia can be built," says YevgenThe 42-year-old historian, journalist and politician is hated by the Putin regime because he has long campaigned for sanctions against officials who have committed human rights violations. Since his arrest in April, the Russian judiciary has slapped charges against him. The last is high treason. Kara-Musa could be sentenced to 24 years in prison for this.
Evgeniya Kara-Murza, who lives in the United States in the Washington DC area, can only find out something about her husband through his lawyers. For example, that the Russian judiciary rejected his request to be allowed to telephone his three children. The judiciary wants to put psychological pressure on him, break him, says his wife. But that won't work.
Evgeniya Kara-Mursa expects a verdict soon
Vladimir Kara-Mursa has probably been through too much for that. He has been active in opposition to the Putin regime for twenty years. He was an associate of Boris Nemtsov , the opposition figure and Putin rival who was shot dead in Moscow in February 2015. Since 2014 he has worked for the Open Russia Foundation of the former oligarch and current Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky.ia Kara-Murza