Released Putin enemy testifies on horror
Russian dissident, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was released thanks to a prisoner swap. He now speaks about the horror and harassment he endured simply because he disagreed with Russian President, Vladimir Putin.
'Life-saving mission'
In April 2022, Vladimir Kara-Murza was arrested. At the time, he was traveling the world as an activist, addressing groups of people about the war crimes against civilians that he believed the Russian regime was committing. This didn't please the Kremlin boss, who had him arrested and promptly sentenced him to 25 years in prison, the longest sentence imposed on a political prisoner since the fall of the Soviet Union. He was supposed to serve that sentence in a prison camp in Siberia. But that didn't happen, as he was released as part of a large prisoner swap that revolved around Wall Street Journal journalist, Evan Gershkovich.
In fact, he himself doesn't speak of a 'prisoner exchange' in interviews with The Independent and The Guardian, but of a "life-saving mission. Because no one can survive 25 years in a Russian gulag, especially after the two poisonings I suffered. For me, that was actually a death sentence."
Same horror than the Soviet era
In 2015 and 2017, he was poisoned twice. It almost cost him his life, but he eventually woke up from his coma. Since then, he has suffered from a nasty nervous disorder.
Only 30 minutes of fresh air
As a historian, he studied Soviet dissidents and how they were treated. "It was shocking to see that nothing had actually changed after all those decades," he says. "Suddenly I experienced it myself. Even the smallest details of what a prison cell looks like, how it's organised, how prison guards talk to you, how the prison transport works... Everything is exactly the same."
The prisoners are forced to stay in their tiny cells for 23.5 hours a day, he testified. They were only allowed outside for half an hour a day, to “walk in circles.” In addition, prisoners were forced to get up at 5am every morning and make their beds, preventing them from lying down during the day.
(MH with SR for Tagtik/Source: The Independent - The Guardian/Illustration picture: Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash)