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.
The opposition politician, who is also a historian and a journalist, comes from a long line of Russian critics.
His father, journalist and television host Vladimir Alexeyevich Kara-Murza, was an outspoken critic of Leonid Brezhnev, the former Soviet Union leader, and a prominent supporter of reforms under Boris Yeltsin in the post-Soviet 1990s.
He attended school in Moscow before his mother remarried a British man and Mr Kara-Murza moved to England as a teenager. He worked in London as a journalist for independent Russian outlets before attending Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge, where he studied history.
He entered Russian politics in the late 1990s as Vladimir Putin was quietly ascending the ranks of the Kremlin to the presidency at the turn of the millennium. He voted against Mr Putin in the 2000 election.
Mr Kara-Murza later became an advisor to government opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered in Moscow outside the Kremlin in 2015.
By this point, Mr Kara-Murza had become heavily involved in Russian opposition politics, working alongside key dissident figures such as oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov, and Mr Nemstov.
In 2015, the same year that his political mentor Mr Nemstov was killed, Mr Kara-Murza was poisoned in what his wife says was a Kremlin assassination attempt. He survived that attempt on his life, only to be poisoned a second time two years later.
