Dhe Russian opposition politician and journalist Vladimir Kara-Mursa has now also been charged with charges of treason, for which he alone faces more than two decades in prison. As Kara-Murza’s defense attorney Vadim Prokhorov said, the charges relate “to three episodes, to all open appearances, recordings of which can be found on the Internet”. It should be about appearances in Lisbon, Oslo and Washington. According to the lawyer, Kara-Mursa rejects any guilt: his words were criticism and did not endanger Russia’s security.
The 41-year-old Kara-Mursa, a comrade-in-arms of the murdered Boris Nemtsov, narrowly survived poisoning in 2015 and 2017. Bellingcat researchers found out last year that he was being shadowed by the same FSB unit as Alexei Navalny, who was poisoned with Novichok in 2020. Kara-Mursa took his family into exile in America, but despite warnings, he always returned to Moscow. Leaving the country “would be the greatest gift that those who oppose Putin’s regime could give the Kremlin,” he told the FAZ last year: “As soon as an opponent is out, he loses his moral authority.”
He is hated by Russia’s powerful, partly because of the long-standing campaign for sanctions against them. An appearance in the Arizona state legislature, at which Kara-Mursa said in mid-March that Putin’s regime was committing war crimes in Ukraine, bombing neighborhoods, hospitals and schools, prompted him in April to accuse him of “false news” about the Russian armed forces to spread, to imprison. Kara-Mursa faces three to ten years in prison in this trial, which is said to have now been combined with the treason trial.
The opposition member has also been considered a “foreign agent” since April. In addition, there has been a third criminal case against him since the summer for involvement in an “undesirable organization”, in which, according to his lawyer, Kara-Mursa is accused of holding a conference to support political prisoners at the end of October 2021. Possibly those in power want to send a new signal of intimidation with the renewed allegation of treason, under which the journalist Ivan Safronov was sentenced to 22 years in a camp at the beginning of September. About the new procedure, state media scattered that Kara-Mursa, as deputy chairman of “Open Russia”, an “undesirable organization”, for a payment of “30,000 dollars a month” helped NATO countries to undermine Russia’s security.
The authorities had tried unsuccessfully to poison Kara-Mursa and drive her out of the country, publicist Anton Orech criticized the prosecution. Now they tried to brand Karsa-Mursa as a traitor to the fatherland. “Do not confuse the homeland with the state, not the authorities with the country,” Orech demanded: “Then you will not confuse friends with enemies either.”
