‘Vladimir Putin is personally responsible’

From prison, Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza comments on Alexey Navalny’s death

Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is serving a 25-year sentence in a maximum-security prison for opposing Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has commented on the death of Alexey Navalny.

In a statement posted on X (formerly Twitter) on February 20, Kara-Murza said that he heard about Navalny’s death “in passing” on the radio last Friday.

“As I write this, I still don’t know any details about what happened […] But I know one thing for sure: Vladimir Putin is personally responsible for Alexey Navalny’s death. Because Alexey was his personal prisoner,” the statement from Kara-Murza says.

“The poisoners from the FSB’s Second Service; the investigators, prosecutors, and judges who processed cases and sentences; the high-level prison officials who created torturous conditions, they could only act on his [Putin’s] personal orders.

“This man has brought death with him throughout his 25 years in power — since that very autumn when peaceful people sleeping in their apartments were blown up in the night. Then came Chechnya, Nord-Ost, Beslan, Georgia, Syria, Ukraine.

The best are dying — the bravest, the most sincere, the most caring. […] And only a vindictive, cowardly, greedy old man still holds on with a death grip, destroying anyone who he sees as a threat to his power.”

Vladimir Kara-Murza has been imprisoned in Russia since April 2022. He is currently serving his sentence in a maximum-security prison in Omsk. In January, Kara-Murza reported that he had been transferred to a “single cell-type room” (EPKT) — the harshest conditions of detention in the Russian prison system.