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9 months ago
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A BRIT jailed in Russia has been moved to a hellish new Siberian prison and placed in solitary confinement for not standing up fast enough.
The UK is “deeply concerned” over the fate of Vladimir Kara-Murza, 42, who was sentenced to 25 years last April by Vladimir Putin’s cronies after opposing the Ukraine war.
AP
AP
The British-Russian citizen grew up in the UK before pursuing politics in MoscowKara-Murza, who also holds a Russian passport and worked as an opposition politician in Moscow, vanished from his prison cell in Omsk, Siberia on Monday.
Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron said he was “deeply concerned” over the fate of the dissident who also suffers from a nerve disorder after two poisonings he blames on the Kremlin.
However, Kara-Murza’s wife, Evgenia, revealed on Tuesday he had been transferred to a new prison and immediately placed in a punishment block.
He said his only crime was not standing up in time when the guard commanded him to “rise” and he was slammed with a “malicious violation”.
The Cambridge graduate will now spend four months in painful solitary confinement, according to the letter he wrote to his lawyer published by Evgenia.
He wrote ironically that the point of the transfer was “so that life doesn’t seem like honey”.
Kara-Murza had publicly criticised Putin since the tyrant came to power in 2000 and was a close aide to opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in central Moscow in 2015.
He had vocally condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine and lobbied for Western sanctions against Moscow.
He was arrested only weeks after the invasion and hours after CNN broadcast an interview with him in which he said Russia was run by “a regime of murderers”.
Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years last April on treason and other charges that he denied, comparing the case against him to a Stalinist show trial.
Kara-Murza wrote: “So now I’m in the IK-7 (penal colony), also in Omsk…It is a special regime colony, there is a special restricted housing unit facility for ‘repeat violators’ like me.”
“I’m in solitary confinement, of course,” he wrote, adding that he was “fine,” had enough food and it was warm in the facility.
More than 160 Russian citizens have been imprisoned for opposing the war, according to human rights group OVD-Info – however Kara-Murza’s is the harshest so far.
A total of 19,854 Russians have been arrested between February 24, 2022, when the war began, and January 28, 2024, for speaking out or demonstrating against the invasion.
Putin’s best-known opponent, Alexei Navalny, was already in jail at the time of the invasion and has since had his term extended by 19 years to more than three decades on new charges related to “extremism”.
He also vanished in December from his prison cell but reappeared 20 days later having been transferred to one of Russia’s toughest prisons in Siberia, known as the “Polar Wolf” colony.
A 72-year-old woman was also jailed recently for five and a half years over two social media posts criticising Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Yevgeniya Maiboroda, from the Rostov region, said she wrote the posts after he relative was caught under rubble after a Russian missile strike in Dnipro.
She is thought to be the oldest person imprisoned for speaking out against the war.
Soon after Kara-Murza was sentenced last year, The Sun spoke to Evgenia who insisted her husband would never give up his struggle.
The couple’s home is Washington and they have three teenage children.
She described how he had already survived two assassination attempts, which she believed were carried out on Putin’s direct orders.
“He was poisoned twice by an unknown substance. Both times it happened in Moscow,” she said.
“He developed very weird symptoms suddenly and ended up in a coma with multiple organ failure.
“Both times he was given a five percent chance of survival. He was lucky enough to survive the times because of the very dedicated team of doctors who treated him.”
Afterwards, he suffered severe nerve damage and had to re-learn how to carry out tasks as simple as buttoning up his shirt and pouring tea, but both times he soon went back to work.
She told The Sun that her jailed husband isn’t brave, but “stubborn”.
That stubbornness, Evgenia says, also comes out of her husband’s genuine love for his country.
She said: “My husband is a genuine Russian patriot, and he has fought for years to bring change in our country.”
In Kara-Murza’s final speech to the court after his sentencing he said that he only failed in one thing.
Failing “to convince enough of my compatriots and politicians in democratic countries of the danger that the current Kremlin regime poses for Russia and for the world”.
He compared the Russia of today to that of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, when Stalin was carrying out a series of repressive show trials and purges of his political opponents.
“For me, as a historian, this is cause for reflection,” he said. “Criminals are supposed to repent of what they have done.
“I, on the other hand, am in prison for my political views. I also know that the day will come when the darkness over our country will dissipate.”
Reuters
AFP
Evgenia Kara-Murza says husband Vladimir will keep fighting for what he believes in
Reuters
English (US)