A prominent Russian opposition figure and outspoken critic of the invasion of Ukraine has been arrested in Moscow, his lawyer told the independent Sota news agency on Monday evening.
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 lobbying for US and EU sanctions on Russian officials accused of human rights abuses. Kara-Murza, a close friend of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead in 2015, nearly died of kidney failure in the first incident.
His longtime lawyer Vadim Prokhorov said Kara-Murza was arrested late Monday for disobeying police orders and faced up to 15 days in jail or a small fine.
It wasn’t immediately clear if Kara-Murza’s arrest was related to his opposition to Russia’s actions in Ukraine, but it comes amid an unprecedented crackdown on independent media and anti-war dissidents. Last month, Russia’s parliament passed a law providing for a prison sentence of up to 15 years for spreading intentionally “fake” news about the military.
Kara-Murza, who studied at Cambridge University, has been a vocal opponent of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and formed an anti-war committee with other leading Russian opposition figures. He was also one of the few prominent opposition figures still living in Russia, as many fled the country for safety reasons following Alexei Navalny’s imprisonment last year.
Aleksandr Podrabinek, a former Soviet dissident who went to Khamovniki police station on Monday to support Kara-Murza, told Sota he believes he was arrested because the authorities were “angered by his bravery”.
Hours before his arrest, Kara-Murza appeared on CNN, where he described the Kremlin as a “regime of murderers.”
“I have absolutely no doubt that because of this war in Ukraine, the Putin regime will end, it does not mean that it will happen tomorrow. The two main issues are time and price, and by price I don’t mean money – I mean the price of human blood and human life, and it was already appalling, but the Putin regime will end with it and there will be a democratic Russia after Putin.” said Kara-Murza.