Putin critic poisoned and caged - but never silenced

Vladimir Kara-Murza was handed a 25-year sentence in a Siberian penal colony for speaking out against the war in Ukraine. Today, he has his freedom, writes Tom Watling

- Tom Watling

The British-Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza is one of the faces of the anti-Kremlin resistance. Following the death of Alexei Navalny in February, he became the best-known Putin critic imprisoned in Russia.

The 42-year-old University of Cambridge graduate was arrested in April 2022 hours after CNN broadcast an interview in which he said Russia was being run by a “regime of murderers”.

A year later, he was sentenced to 25 years in a Siberian penal colony in the Omsk region, where he was consigned to a punishment cell only three metres long and one and a half metres wide, nearly 6,000 miles from his wife and children living in the US. His fate was decried by governments across the West.

His sentence remains the longest handed down to a Kremlin critic since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Even from prison, he published opinion columns in The Washington Post that were rewarded in May with the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

Grigory Vaypan, a senior lawyer at Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights group, and laureate of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize for his defence of political prisoners, said the risk of death facing Mr Kara-Murza was high.

“Prominent government critics now face increased risks to their lives in Russian prisons. The more prominent the critic, the higher the risk,” he told The Independent.

Who is Vladimir Kara-Murza?