US Lawmakers Call for Release of Putin’s ‘Number One Political Prisoner’ as Concerns Grow over Safety

A group of bipartisan US lawmakers marked two years since Russian opposition leader and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza’s imprisonment by calling for his immediate release. The Moscow City Court sentenced him to 25 years in April last year on charges including treason, after he criticised Russia’s invasion of Ukraine during a speech at the Arizona House of Representatives in 2014. His sentence is said to be the longest term handed down to a political prisoner since the end of the Soviet era.
In their appeal, senators Ben Cardin and Roger Wicker led a group of 80 lawmakers urging President Joe Biden’s administration to declare Kara-Murza “unlawfully and wrongfully detained”. The letter warned that his life was in danger due to concerns over the killing last year of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Kira Yarmysh, an aide to imprisoned anti-corruption campaigner Aleksei Navalny, speaks during a news conference in Berlin on January 14, 2022, marking one year since Navalny’s arrest at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
“There is little time left to end the ongoing and unjust detention of U.S. Legal Permanent Resident and Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza,” said the letter, which also noted that his wife has “grave concerns for her husband’s life”. It continued: “Mr. Kara-Murza’s family have grave concerns that he may not survive much longer”. The spokesman from Biden’s State Department stated in response to a request for comment that they continuously review the circumstances surrounding detentions of US nationals overseas, including those in Russia, “for indicators that they are wrongful”.
Kara-Murza was reportedly poisoned twice by agents of the Russian state in 2015 and 2017. Vladimir Vaypan from Human Rights Watch has described Kara-Murza as “Putin’s number one political prisoner”. He added that, given Putin’s willingness to murder critics such as Alexei Navalny following the attack against him using a nerve agent in August 2020, it is clear that “Kara-Murza’s life is certainly in danger now”.
Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights group, currently lists around 700 political prisoners across Russia. They are often subjected to additional punishment for continuing their advocacy behind bars. According to Human Rights Watch: “They can be put into solitary confinement; deprived of food or mail; denied phone calls with relatives or family visits”.
Evgenia Kara-Murza, the wife of Vladimir Kara-Murza and a human rights advocate herself, spoke at an event on Capitol Hill regarding her husband’s plight. During that event, she referred to Navalny’s death in prison last year as well as the 2015 killing of Russian politician Boris Nemtsov – both high profile deaths attributed by many observers to orders from Putin himself – and said: “They target the most courageous, the most principled”. Evgenia explained how Kara-Murza had warned that “when people in free countries today think and speak about Russia, they will remember not only war criminals who are sitting in the Kremlin but also those who stand up to them because we’re Russians too”.