'I was scared. Vladimir is an enemy of the Russian state'

As jailed Putin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza is moved from prison to hospital, his wife speaks to Tom Watling about her fears of what will happen – and urges the West to step in

- Tom Watling

The wife of jailed British-Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza has urged the West to step in now to help her husband, fearing what the Kremlin may do to him while he is being treated in a prison hospital.

The 42-year-old face of the Russian opposition to Vladimir Putin, who grew up in London and earned a history degree from the University of Cambridge, is currently being held in a medical facility connected to his Siberian penal colony, having been moved there on 4 July. Evgenia Kara-Murza spent days not knowing where or how he was.

His lawyers had flown in from Moscow but had been denied access to their client in “special regime” prison colony No 7, in Omsk, Siberia on that Thursday morning. They were later told by the prison authorities that he had been moved to the prison hospital, though no explanation was provided for the transfer. But it wouldn’t be until the following Wednesday that his local Omsk lawyer could reach him.

Having spent around 280 days in solitary confinement, in a cell only a few metres long and wide, the move to the hospital, where a prisoner is denied access to their lawyers, had severed Kara-Murza’s final human connection, excluding prison officials and medical staff. Evgenia, his friends, Western officials and human rights activists have described his treatment in solitary confinement as a form of torture, even before the latest move.