A key British-Russian dissident who escaped death after being rescued from solitary confinement during a historic US-brokered prisoner swap has vowed the downfall of Vladimir Putin is “inevitable”.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, 43, served two years of a 25-year sentence for speaking out against the war in Ukraine before being freed from his Siberian penal colony in August.
As one of the most high-profile opposition figures to Putin, he is adamant that even if he – like Alexei Navalny – is killed, others will rise up against the regime.
In an exclusive sit-down interview with The Independent hours after arriving in the UK for the first time since being freed, Kara-Murza speaks at length about the future of Russia – and how those who object to the status quo cannot be stopped.
“Even if Vladimir Putin kills all of us, the current leaders of the opposition, others will come in our place,” he says.
“Others from the younger generation. The people who turned out in the tens of thousands for the funeral procession of Alexei Navalny in Moscow earlier this year. People who have been leaving these flowers at makeshift memorials all over the country. They will come and take our place to find a democratic Russia, even when none of us are there.”
He thanked The Independent for shining a light on his case, adding: “Thank you so much for all your coverage over the past two years. It is because of this that I am sitting here today talking to you.”
The father of three, who met Sir Keir Starmer today, has escaped death but is more than willing to risk his life again for his country by returning to Russia.
He survived two poisoning attempts in 2015 and 2017, which he says were orchestrated by the Kremlin, and in 2022 was sentenced to 25 years for his opposition, the longest political sentence in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
The attempts on his life left him with polyneuropathy, a debilitating nerve condition that affects his ability to feel his fingers and toes. At the start of his prison sentence his lawyer Vadim Prokhorov was told Kara-Murza had three years to live. “It was a death sentence,” he says.
But on multiple occasions in the six weeks since his release, he has said his return to Russia is a matter of when not if.
“I am not going to be paranoid,” he says when asked about future threats to his life. “I know that what I am doing is the right thing to do. I know that I am right.
“I know that Russia will be better off as a normal democratic country and not an archaic, corrupt dictatorship that it is today.”
He bristles at the question of whether Russia can truly be democratic.
“I am really fed up with this offensive, insulating and profoundly wrong narrative that somehow Russia and democracy don’t work,” he says. “To me, this is racism to speak about any country in this way, not just Russia. And it is a fake argument.”
He refers to Ronald Reagan’s 1982 Palace of Westminster speech, in which the then US president said that “it would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy” as evidence of what Western leaders should be thinking.
And he certainly has the ear of the West’s most influential leaders. Since his release from prison, he has met US president Joe Biden, German chancellor Olaf Scholz, French president Emmanuel Macron and Finnish president Alexander Stubb. This morning, he met Sir Keir Starmer, in a meeting that wasn’t originally meant to happen but was hastily organised by Downing Street on Thursday night.
In a press conference after the meeting, he told The Independent that he believed the PM and David Lammy were thinking seriously about the strategy for a world after Putin.
The first part of all these diplomatic conversations, he says, is about the urgent need to help the thousand or more Russian opposition prisoners still being held in dangerous environments. This latest swap, he says, cannot be the last.
He mentions Alexei Gorinov, who is serving seven years in prison for calling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine an aggression and a war, and who is missing part of his lung.
He also references Maria Ponomarenko, a journalist serving six years in prison for sharing a post about the Russian bombing of the drama theatre in the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol. Hundreds died as a result but Moscow arrested her for spreading “false information”. She has since been “injected with unknown drugs and treated brutally”, according to Amnesty International, and her mental health has severely deteriorated.
“The health situation is so dire that it is now a question of life or death for them in a very literal sense,” Kara-Murza says.
But the second part of his conversation with these world leaders, he said, is about the future of Russia, and the need to have a “Russia strategy”. His comments echo those of Alexei Navalny’s former chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, who in an interview with The Independent last week called for the West to open up its borders to Russia and begin cultivating the youth of Russia.
“The only way to have stability, security, peace and democracy in Europe over the long term is to have a free, peaceful and democratic Russia,” he says.
“We are the biggest country in Europe. That is a geographical fact. Nothing is ever going to change that. Russia is not going to disappear. It is not going to go away, even if some people may wish that. It’s not going to happen.
“If we really are looking for a strategic solution to all of this, as opposed to freezing everything and pushing the problem onto the next generation, as has been done so many times before, then it has to have a Russia component to it.”
He describes a chat with Biden last month in which the US president suddenly turned to him in the middle of a conversation and asked: “What will Russia look like in 10 years?”
Kara-Murza says he thanked Biden for this question, before adding: “These are the important questions. I will have those same conversations here in London.”
Crucially, he adds, if the West wants to ensure Ukraine is left in peace, then it is incumbent on Western leaders to help civilian Russia as well.
“The first country that should be interested in a democratic Russia is Ukraine,” he says. “There is not going to be a long-term solution to any of this without a Russian component.
“While there continues to be an aggressive, dictatorial, murderous regime in the Kremlin, Ukraine is never going to be safe. Ukraine is never going to be secure. Ukraine is never going to be at peace.
“So, we have to have a strategy, otherwise in a couple more years we’ll be talking about another attack.”
He adds that he has been in touch with “many Ukrainian friends, including members of parliament, including people who are in the current government, who also do understand the need for a Russia strategy, who are prepared to look beyond the emotions”.
He admits that “emotions are very understandable when children are dying every day because of bombs Putin has ordered to be fired at Ukraine”, but he is adamant that this tragedy cannot be allowed to get in the way of future peace.
“We cannot base long-term political strategy on emotion,” he says. “It has to be rational. It has to be based on what we want to happen, what we want to see, what we want Europe to look like 10 years down the line.”
While the war in Ukraine rages on, he says, the West must now think about Russia more seriously because who knows when the Putin regime will fall? It could collapse in just a matter of days.
“The one thing we certainly know from the modern history of Russia is that major political changes in our country happen at the snap of a finger. Sudden, unexpected, with nobody seeing them coming.
“Both the Romanov empire at the beginning of the 20th century and the Soviet regime at the end of that century collapsed in three days,” he says. “March 1917 and August 1991. This is exactly how it is going to happen next time.
“None of us knows when or precisely in what circumstances the next political change will come in Russia, but it will, because nothing is forever. It might be in three years; it might be in two months. But it will come.”
So, he says, taking a breath, the West needs to be ready.