Jailed opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza transferred to hospital in Siberia

Imprisoned Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza has been transferred from the Siberian penal colony where he has been serving a 25-year sentence for treason to a hospital run by Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service, his wife announced on Friday.

Yevgenia Kara-Murza, said that her husband was transferred to Regional Hospital 11 in Western Siberia’s Omsk region on Thursday evening and that his lawyers had not been permitted to visit him there despite repeated attempts to access the facility.

Kara Murza suffers from polyneuropathy, or severe nerve damage, most likely caused by two poisoning attempts in 2015 and 2017 likely carried out by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) that left the politician in a life-threatening condition and should have prevented him from serving his sentence in prison.

Kara-Murza was convicted of treason, involvement with “undesirable organisations” and for “disseminating false information” about the Russian military in April 2023, and was sent to the notoriously tough Siberian penal colony to serve his sentence where he has been frequently placed in solitary confinement, despite his declining health.

Formerly the co-chair of murdered opposition politician Boris Nemtsov’s Foundation for Freedom and a former vice president of the Free Russia Foundation, Kara-Murza is one of Russia’s highest profile opposition politicians and received a Pulitzer prize in 2024 for his columns for The Washington Post “insisting on a democratic future for his country”.