Vladimir Kara-Murza, 35, Russian political activist and journalist, has been hospitalized in Moscow “with symptoms similar to those he had two years ago,” sudden kidney failure and related problems, said his wife Evgenia Kara-Murza on Thursday.
In spring 2015 Mr. Kara-Murza was hospitalized for about two months with these symptoms, which were widely attributed to his having been poisoned, though no specific cause was ever named.
Mrs. Kara-Murza told the BBC that her husband is in a medically-induced coma and on life support. “It’s the same clinical picture as last time,” she said, with an acute onset and rapid deterioration.
In June of last year, Vladimir Kara-Murza recalled to the Senate Foreign Relations committee the 1991 assertion by the member states of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) that “issues relating to human rights, democracy, and the rule of law ‘are matters of direct and legitimate concern to all participating States and do not belong exclusively to the internal affairs of the State concerned.'”
“Our friends in the West,” he continued, “often ask how they can help the cause of human rights in Russia. The answer is simple: please stay true to your values . . .” supporting human rights, in particular through full implementation of the Magnitsky Act, which imposes sanctions on individual Russians deemed to be responsible for the death in custody of lawyer and activist Sergei Magnitsky, and for other criminal actions.
“Those who oppose Mr. Putin’s regime risk not only their wellbeing and their freedom. They also risk their lives,” said Kara-Murza, speaking of his friend and colleague Boris Nemtsov, mysteriously shot to death two years ago only 200 yards from the Kremlin wall.
David Satter, longtime Russia analyst and author of the recent The Less You Know the Better You Sleep, about Russia’s path toward dictatorship since the Yeltsin era, notes that it is widely believed in some circles that Nemtsov’s vocal support of the Magnitsky Act and other sanctions was a factor in his death.
Satter warns that U.S.-Russian relations are on a perilous footing with the recent inauguration of President Donald Trump. With his assertions that such crimes as the murder of journalists aren’t “proven” to have been done at Putin’s direction, Satter says, Trump is creating “an extremely dangerous situation in which the Russian authorities may feel they’ve been given a green light to harass, imprison, or even kill political opponents.”
The timing of this attack on Kara-Murza, and the renewed aggression in eastern Ukraine, suggests to Satter the possibility that Trump is being deliberately tested to see if the United States will uphold human rights and the rule of law, or if it has laid aside the obligations it has accepted in the past.
On Wednesday Kara-Murza and his colleagues filed an application to hold a late February march in Nemtsov’s memory. The same day, he posted on Facebook a photo of red roses at the site where Nemtsov was murdered in February 2015. “We remember,” he said. And the bad guys appear to have long memories, too.
