World Courant
BBC
“I used to be completely positive that I’d die in Putin’s jail.”
It’s nearly the very first thing Vladimir Kara-Murza tells me after his shock launch within the largest prisoner trade because the Chilly Struggle.
The Russian opposition politician is painfully skinny – from stress, he says. He’s additionally nonetheless recovering from his abrupt switch from a maximum-security jail in Siberia to pressured exile after greater than two years behind bars.
“It’s surreal, like watching a film,” he describes the sensation. “But it surely’s a very good film,” by which he’s lastly reunited with the household he hasn’t seen since his arrest in Moscow in April 2022.
His youngest son follows him in all places, as a result of he would not wish to lose sight of him.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, who additionally holds British nationality, was convicted of treason and sentenced to 25 years in jail for his fierce and protracted condemnation of Vladimir Putin and the large-scale invasion of Ukraine.
He has spent the previous 11 months in solitary confinement, pressured to fold his mattress at 5am each morning and given solely about an hour of pen and paper every day.
“It’s really easy to lose your thoughts. You lose observe of time, house. Every part,” he reveals in one in every of his first lengthy interviews since his launch. “You do nothing, you don’t discuss to anybody, you don’t go wherever. Day after day after day.”
He was not allowed to name dwelling and was solely allowed to talk to his youngsters twice in over two years.
The extra punishment was much more bodily extreme.
Almost a decade in the past, Vladimir Kara-Murza almost died from an unknown toxin and continues to be affected by the after-effects, together with nerve injury. In September, he now reveals, a jail physician gave him “a yr, 18 months at most” to dwell if he remained behind bars.
“After two poisonings by the FSB, I’m not precisely in the appropriate state of well being for a strict-regime jail,” he explains with an ironic smile.
Sarah Rainsford/BBC
Vladimir Kara-Murza was reunited together with his spouse Evgenia after his launch in Frankfurt
Kara-Murza was one in every of eight Russian dissidents who disappeared from prisons final week.
As legal professionals and members of the family raised the alarm, rumors of an impending swap started to flow into. The prisoners themselves had no concept.
As a substitute, when guards burst into Kara-Murza’s cell in Omsk, he thought he was “going to be led out to be shot,” he recalled. “I actually thought they have been going to execute me.”
He was not too long ago ordered to signal a request for a presidential pardon, however refused to beg for mercy from Vladimir Putin, whom he criticizes as “a dictator, usurper and assassin.”
Kara-Murza was taken to Moscow and the infamous FSB jail of Lefortovo. 5 days later he was led out to board a bus and noticed the opposite dissidents inside, every with an FSB guard in a balaclava.
Then one other guard took the bus’s microphone and introduced that they have been being taken for a prisoner trade. No particulars got.
“No person requested our permission,” says Kara-Murza. “We have been loaded onto a airplane like cattle and flown away.”
The activist landed in Germany carrying the one civilian garments he owned: black lengthy johns, a T-shirt and the slippers he wore for the jail bathe.
The Russian dissidents have been a part of a bunch of political prisoners who have been launched, together with well-known Americans reminiscent of journalist Evan Gershkovich.
Three have been former activists from the group of Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician who died instantly in jail earlier this yr. Navalny was initially purported to be a part of the advanced swap.
In trade for the dissidents, Russia acquired a handful of spies and criminals, together with the primary prize Vladimir Putin was after: an FSB hitman named Vadim Krasikov who dedicated a homicide in broad daylight in a Berlin park.
The choose who sentenced him to life in jail known as the killing an act of “state terrorism.”
“I wish to respectfully urge anybody who criticizes this (trade) not to consider prisoner exchanges, however about saving lives,” Kara-Murza argued, responding to the controversy over Krasikov’s launch.
The killer was welcomed dwelling with a crimson carpet and a hug from Putin himself.
“Aren’t 16 lives definitely worth the launch of 1 assassin?”
For a very long time, Germany was unsure. The delay, Kara-Murza argues, may effectively have price Alexei Navalny his life.
German Police by way of Bellingcat
FSB agent Vadim Krasikov was launched from jail in Germany as a part of the deal
The enjoyment over the reunion of the Kara Murzas is overshadowed by ideas of the Russian prisoners who haven’t been launched.
“I’m so glad and overwhelmed to see these folks free, but in addition very unhappy that so many individuals are left behind,” his spouse Evgenia tells me. “I really feel responsible.”
Human rights group Memorial has an inventory of tons of of political prisoners and campaigned exhausting for a precedence group to be included.
“There are folks with severe medical situations, like Alexei Gorinov who’s lacking a part of his lung, who do not have a lot time.”
Her husband speaks of these “nonetheless languishing in Putin’s Gulag” and the hope for additional exchanges.
He had solely been free for 5 minutes when he grew to become embroiled in controversy.
In statements made shortly after touchdown in Germany, Vladimir Kara-Murza argued that sanctions associated to the conflict in Ukraine needs to be extra focused.
There was rapid outrage amongst Ukrainians who claimed that his precedence in releasing him was to mitigate the penalties Russia was paying for waging conflict.
Kara-Murza calls it calibration.
“I want extra info,” he admits. “I notice that February 2022 modified lots.”
However he needs to know why a Russian human rights lawyer can’t journey to the Baltic states for a convention, whereas a Russian missile carrying a Western-made chip can hit a residential constructing in Ukraine.
“The duty for what the Putin regime is doing there’s shared by Russian society, a lot of which has chosen to show a blind eye to the abuses and repression,” he argues.
“However allow us to not overlook the duty of these Western international locations, which for years most popular to do enterprise with Vladimir Putin, whereas they knew very effectively who he was and what he represented.”
In 2022, Vladimir Kara-Murza was arrested for insisting on being in Russia and talking out. Now that he’s banned from touring, he worries about his proper to name others to motion there. He thinks he’ll really feel “extra restricted.”
However he’ll proceed to sentence the conflict in Ukraine.
“Putin can’t win this conflict. Ukraine should win, and there needs to be extra assist from Western international locations for that to occur,” he argues.
Traditionally, he says, “home windows of alternative” for democratic change come up after a “disastrous army defeat.”
As his airplane took off from Russia, the FSB guard subsequent to Kara-Murza instructed him to look out the window.
“He mentioned it was the final time I noticed my homeland.” The activist laughed. “I mentioned, I’m a historian, so I’m positive I’ll return to my nation.”
“And it’ll occur lots quicker than you assume.”
Vladimir Kara-Murza thought he would die in a Russian jail
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