How my old friend Vlad became a thorn in Putin’s side

Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for breaking Putin’s “misinformation” laws, laws introduced after his invasion of Ukraine, an act which Putin himself has all but given up pretending is anything other than a war.

So absurd is the level of misinformation required to maintain the lies about Ukraine that Putin has, on several occasions, almost broken his own laws himself.

Naturally, Kara-Murza’s crime is to have had the courage to tell the truth; to accurately describe Putin’s Russia as the kleptocracy and autocracy it is. Kara-Murza is 41 years old, and for almost 25 years already he has been serving a sentence that has been entirely self-imposed: of fighting for a different future for his country, and never giving up.

He has already nearly died twice, from attempted assassination via chemical poisoning. And he has already spent a year in prison, not seeing his wife or his three young children.

It happens to be almost 25 years since I first met Vlad, and knew him well for a few years when we were undergraduates. Everyone called him Vlad. I called him Vlad when I interviewed him six years ago, after his second poisoning. It’s only more recently I’ve discovered that Vlad is actually short for Vladislav. Vladimirs tend to get called “Vova”. But, typically for him, he has never once mentioned it in the many decades he’s gladly gone by the wrong name.

He’d already been to school in England, and was entirely bilingual, and already had bucketloads of the kind of charm and energy that many politicians have.

He was already a grown-up too, looking back, in a world of children. One night he played some of us a VHS tape he had with him, of his father, the journalist, also called Vladimir Kara Murza, broadcasting on live independent television while the channel was being raided and shut down by Russian state security services in the late 1990s.

He well knew, all those years ago, the direction of travel. Last year he gave a speech to the Arizona state senate. He said that “Russia is a nation of symbols.” And that it was obvious exactly who Putin was from the moment in 1999 when he changed the Russian national anthem back to Stalin’s approved version.

Since then, for decades, world leaders have, he said, “rolled out the red carpet for him, shaken his hand, or asked for ‘a reset.’” They have been complicit in his appeasement, they have allowed stolen money to be stashed away in their banks, or spent on luxurious lifestyles in London or Paris or New York.

He has already spent 25 years warning us. As early as about 2001 he once breezily said to me that it was tiring work, that he was getting nowhere and he’d kind of had enough. He was doing his degree in history, so I mentioned something to him about the Aventine Secession, when opposition parties withdrew from the Italian parliament in protest at the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, but the consequence was that it provided the opportunity for Mussolini to assume dictatorial power. I remember it because it was the only time that I knew about something he didn’t.

Every time I saw him after that, he mentioned the Aventine Secession. “They just walked away Tom! They quit! They walked out! And look what happened! Look what happened!”

The Aventine Secession was the first thing he mentioned when I called him up in 2017. He did it to make the point that he was simply never, ever going to give up. That he would go on to the end, whatever the cost may be. In his statement to the court last week, he was predictably defiant.

“Not only do I not repent of any of this, I am proud of it,” he said. “I blame myself for only one thing: that over the years of my political activity I have not managed to convince enough of my compatriots and enough politicians in the democratic countries of the danger that the current regime in the Kremlin poses for Russia and for the world. Today this is obvious to everyone, but at a terrible price — the price of war.”

For most of the last year, Vlad’s friends in the UK have tried to drum up publicity for his cause, but his cause is already well known. His own personal dynamism in pursuit of his cause has already led, for example, to a deep friendship with the former US senator John McCain. Vlad was one of the pallbearers at his funeral.

Vlad was educated in the UK, lived in the US, and is now fighting for the rights enjoyed in those countries not to be permanently extinguished in his own country. His cause is our cause and he should be regarded as one of our own.

He will have known the consequences when he spent the early weeks after the invasion, criticising Putin on international television from a flat in Moscow, and all the while refusing to leave. He actually returned to Moscow from London for the purposes of doing so, saying it was his duty. How, as a Russian opposition politician, could he expect Russians to stand up to Putin if he would not do so himself?

He will also know that whatever sentence imposed on him is largely meaningless. As Alexei Navalny likes to say, both he and Putin are serving life sentences. One of them will have to end first.

His final words to the court were as follows:

“I know that the day will come when the darkness over our country will dissipate. When black will be called black and white will be called white; when at the official level it will be recognised that two times two is still four; when a war will be called a war, and a usurper a usurper; and when those who kindled and unleashed this war, rather than those who tried to stop it, will be recognised as criminals.

“This day will come as inevitably as spring follows even the coldest winter. And then our society will open its eyes and be horrified by what terrible crimes were committed on its behalf. From this realisation, from this reflection, the long, difficult but vital path toward the recovery and restoration of Russia, its return to the community of civilised countries, will begin.

“Even today, even in the darkness surrounding us, even sitting in this cage, I love my country and believe in our people. I believe that we can walk this path.”

These are universal values. People of any country should be grateful there are people like Vlad around to fight for them. His fight should not be forgotten.