Vladimir Kara-Murza, 40, is a veteran Kremlin critic who says he was deliberately poisoned in Moscow in 2015 and 2017 in retaliation for his efforts to impose US and EU sanctions on Russian officials accused of human rights abuses. A close friend of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was shot and killed in 2015, Kara-Murza nearly died of kidney failure in the first incident. His longtime lawyer, Vadim Prokhorov, said Kara-Murza was arrested late Monday on charges of disobeying police orders and faced up to 15 days in prison or a small fine. It was not immediately clear whether Kara-Murza’s arrest was linked to his opposition to Russia’s actions in Ukraine, but it comes amid an unprecedented crackdown on independent media and anti-war rhetoric. Last month, Russia’s parliament passed a law imposing a prison sentence of up to 15 years for deliberately spreading “false” news about the military. Kara-Murza, who studied at Cambridge University, was a staunch opponent of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, setting up an anti-war committee with other leading figures in the Russian opposition. He has also been one of the few prominent opposition figures still living in Russia, as many have fled the country amid security concerns following the ouster of Alexei Navalny last year. Aleksandr Podrabinek, a former Soviet dissident who went to the Khamovniki police station on Monday to support Kara-Murza, told Sota he believed he had been arrested because authorities were “outraged by his courage”. Hours before his arrest, Kara-Murza appeared on CNN, describing the Kremlin as a “murderous regime.” “I have absolutely no doubt that the Putin regime will end this war in Ukraine, it does not mean that it will happen tomorrow. The two key questions are time and price and as a price, I do not mean money – I mean the price of human blood and lives and it was already horrible, but the Putin regime will end with that and there will be a democratic Russia after Putin Said Kara-Murza.
