Russian dissident and opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza was released in a U.S.-Russia prisoner swap on Thursday, August 1st, the largest swap since the end of the Cold War. He was arrested on April 22nd, 2022, mere hours after declaring on CNN that Russia was being run by a “regime of murderers,” and sentenced to twenty-five years of imprisonment in a Siberian penal colony.
Despite living in a tiny cell six thousand miles from his family, Kara-Murza continued to protest the Russian government in commentaries published in The Washington Post, which won him the Pulitzer Prize.
In 2015, IRI honored Boris Nemtsov, a pro-democracy opposition figure in Russia who had been recently assassinated, with its Freedom Award, IRI’s highest honor given to those who work to advance freedom and democracy. Kara-Murza accepted the award on Nemtsov’s behalf and promised not to give up on the dream of a free and democratic Russia.
Over the past decade, Kara-Murza has also been a deliberate target of the Russian government and was poisoned twice in two years, 2015 (the same year that Nemtsov was killed) and 2017. Kara-Murza had recently emerged from a coma resulting from the first poisoning when he accepted the Freedom Award for Nemtsov. IRI condemned both the poisonings as well as Kara-Murza’s politically motivated arrest and conviction. IRI also called for his release, along with all other political prisoners in Russia.
Due to his outspoken criticisms of the government, Kara-Murza was declared a “foreign agent,” accused of spreading false information about the Russian military’s actions in Ukraine, and eventually charged with treason. This charge earned him the harshest sentence handed down by the Russian government since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
After his arrest, Kara-Murza wrote of the “foreign agent law,” that “The Justice Ministry could now place the “foreign agent” label on anyone it deemed to be “under foreign influence” — meaning, in practice, on any public figure who spoke out against the Kremlin.” The National Endowment for Democracy, IRI’s parent organization, was designated as an “undesirable” group in 2016, threatening it with fines and jail time for personnel.
After more than two years of calling for him to be set free, IRI welcomes the release of Vladimir Kara-Murza, a tireless defender of freedom, and looks forward to working together again in pursuit of democracy in Russia and around the world.
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