Putin prossegue sua política de crimes de guerra e de destruição sistemática da Ucrânia e seu povo - Reuters

A missão de Putin, depois de derrotado em sua intenção de ocupar e conquistar toda a Ucrânia: é um só, destruir o país e eliminar o máximo possível de ucranianos. (PRA)

Russia hits Ukraine with missiles, drones as 'dear friend' Xi departs

By Dan Peleschuk

Reuters, March 22, 2023

• Xi departs after show of solidarity with Putin
• Zaporizhzhia apartment block struck
• At least eight killed in dormitories south of Kyiv

KYIV/ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine, March 22 (Reuters) - Russia blasted an apartment block in Ukraine with missiles on Wednesday and swarmed cities with drone attacks overnight, in a display of force as President Vladimir Putin bid farewell to his visiting "dear friend" and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Firefighters battled a blaze in two adjacent residential buildings in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, where officials said at least one person was killed and 33 wounded by a twin missile strike.

In Rzhyshchiv, a riverside town south of Kyiv, at least eight people were killed and seven injured after a drone struck two dormitories and a college, regional police chief Andrii Nebytov said.

"This must not become 'just another day' in Ukraine or anywhere else in the world. The world needs greater unity and determination to defeat Russian terror faster and protect lives," President Volodymyr Zelenskiy tweeted, with security camera video showing one building exploding.

A playground and a car park at the scene in Zaporizhzhia were littered with glass, debris and wrecked cars. Emergency workers carried out the wounded or escorted those who could walk.

An elderly woman with scratches on her face sat alone on a bench, wiping tears and whispering prayers.

"When I got out, there was destruction, smoke, people screaming, debris. Then the firefighters and rescuers came," said Ivan Nalyvaiko, 24.

During the night, sirens blared across the capital and parts of northern Ukraine, and the military said it had shot down 16 of 21 Iranian-made Shahed suicide drones.

Zelenskiy visited troops near the front line. His office released video of him handing out medals to soldiers, which it said was filmed near Bakhmut, the eastern city where Ukrainian forces are mounting a defence in what has become Europe's deadliest infantry battle since World War Two.

"It is painful to see the cities of Donbas ... to which Russia has brought terrible suffering and ruin," Zelenskiy said in a nightly video address, referring to the larger eastern region around Bakhmut that Russia claims as its territory.

He cited nearly constant sounds of air raid sirens in the city of Kramatorsk and threats of shelling.

International groups estimate rebuilding Ukraine will cost $411 billion - 2.6 times Ukraine's 2022 gross domestic product.

CHINA-RUSSIA UNITY

Hosting Xi in Moscow this week was Putin's grandest diplomatic gesture since he ordered the invasion of neighbour Ukraine 13 months ago and became a pariah in the West. The two men referred to each other as "dear friend", promised economic cooperation, condemned the West and described relations as the best they have ever been.

Xi departed telling Putin: "Now there are changes that haven't happened in 100 years. When we are together, we drive these changes."

"I agree," Putin said.

But the public remarks were notably short of specifics, and during the visit Xi had almost nothing to say about the Ukraine war, beyond that China's position was "impartial".

The White House urged Beijing to pressure Russia to withdraw. Washington also criticised the timing of the trip, just days after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin on war crimes charges.

China has proposed a peace plan for Ukraine that the West largely dismisses as vague at best, and at worst a ploy to buy time for Putin to regroup his forces.

Ukraine says there can be no peace unless Russia withdraws from occupied land. Moscow says Kyiv must recognise territorial "realities" after its claim to have annexed nearly a fifth of Ukraine.

RUSSIAN WEAKENING?

Russia's only notable gains have been around Bakhmut, but Kyiv has decided in recent weeks not to withdraw there, saying its defenders were inflicting enough losses on the Russian attackers to justify holding out.

In an intelligence update, Britain's ministry of defence said that while there was still a risk the Ukrainian garrison in Bakhmut could be surrounded, Russia's assault on the city could be running out of steam. Ukraine's military General Staff agreed, saying Russia's offensive potential in Bakhmut was declining.

A Ukrainian counterattack in recent days west of Bakhmut was likely to relieve pressure on Ukraine's supply route, the British ministry said.

Reporting by Reuters bureaux; Writing by Peter Graff, Frank Jack Daniel and Cynthia Osterman; Editing by Philippa Fletcher, Andrew Cawthorne and Grant McCool

Guerra de agressão da Rússia contra a Ucrânia: CRIMES DE GUERRA e CONTRA A HUMANIDADE de Putin

 Más notícias para as tropas russas na Ucrânia provocam CRIMES DE GUERRA.

O Brasil vai permanecer indiferente?

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

A Hundred Wrecked Tanks In A Hundred Hours: Ukraine Guts ...

https://www.forbes.com › dadivasse

13 de set. de 2022 — 6 destroyed half of the best tank division in the best tank army in the Russian armed forces. A hundred wrecked or captured tanks in a hundred ...

• A Russian Regiment, Currently Surrounded In Eastern ...

  https://www.forbes.com › davidaxe

30 de set. de 2022 — A Russian Regiment, Currently Surrounded In Eastern Ukraine, Has A Tragic History Of Defeat. David Axe. Forbes Staff. I write about ships, ...

Lessons for the West: Russia's military failures in Ukraine

https://ecfr.eu › article › lessons-for...

11 de ago. de 2022 — The episode revealed that the Russian military's logistics were so poorly organised that many units simply could not reach their ...

'Kill everyone': Russian violence in Ukraine was strategic

https://apnews.com › article › russia...

27 de out. de 2022 — While Chaiko was directing Russia's attack on Kyiv from Zdvyzhivka, the men were interrogated and tortured by Russian troops and then shot ...

'Kill Everyone': Russian Violence in Ukraine Was Strategic - PBS

https://www.pbs.org › wgbh › article

26 de out. de 2022 — 'That's Where People Were Killed'. Fierce Ukrainian resistance and poor planning pushed Russian troops off their planned line of attack. Some of ...

At the front line of Ukraine's struggle for Kherson - BBC News

https://www.bbc.com › news › worl...

há 3 dias — Now there are suggestions that Russia might be about to give up at ... that Kherson was defended by Russia's best units, from the marines, ...

Russia Lost 900 'Elite' Soldiers in Ukraine Fighting — Report

https://www.themoscowtimes.com › ...

1 de set. de 2022 — At least 337 marines have been killed since the start of the invasion ... lost 245 troops, Russia's military intelligence lost 151 soldiers, ...

Ukraine: Here's what comes next for the conflict | CNN

https://www.cnn.com › 2022/09/18 › europe › ukraine-ru...

19 de set. de 2022 — There are persistent reports of discipline fraying among Russian units. The disorderly retreat in Kharkiv, with vast amounts of military ...

Ukraine Under Attack: Documenting the Russian Invasion

https://www.nytimes.com › World › Europe

há 3 dias — Shattered towns, mass graves and suffering beyond measure greet the Ukrainian forces steadily pushing back Russian troops, revealing the ...

• As Russian Troop Deaths Climb, Morale May Be an Issue

  https://www.nytimes.com › politics

  16 de mar. de 2022 — More than 7000 Russian troops have been killed in less than three ... the top Pentagon official for Russia and Ukraine during the Obama ...

  
  

O maior erro estratégico da diplomacia lulopetista: o BRICS

 Primeiro a notícia neste 15/11/2022:

“🇺🇦"Há um ataque contra Kiev": dois prédios residenciais foram atingidos por mísseis, diz prefeito da capital ucraniana.

Explosões foram ouvidas na cidade pouco depois de o presidente Volodimir Zelenski pedir ao G20 que pressione a Rússia pela paz.”

https://t.co/d7XIdM9kka

Agora meu comentário, PRA: Putin perpetra crimes de guerra contra a população ucraniana. O mundo, os demais membros do BRICS, especialmente o BRASIL, deveriam dar uma resposta contundente CONTRA o tirano de Moscou. 

O atual governo não vai fazer isso.

Uma declaração de Lula a esse respeito, declarando INACEITÁVEL tal postura é absolutamente NECESSÁRIA! 

Lula vai fazer isso?

Não acredito! Lula, como o Bozo, quer ter boas relações com Putin e preservar essa fantasmagoria do BRICS, que considero o maior erro estratégico do lulopetismo diplomático na frente externa.

Esse erro estratégico infelizmente será preservado no próximo governo e este será o meu principal ponto de discordância em relação a ele. E não se trata apenas de uma situação inaceitável no plano diplomático, o total DESRESPEITO em relação à Carta da ONU e aos dispositivos mais ELEMENTARES do Direito Internacional, o que envergonha os princípios e valores de nossa diplomacia, inclusive princípios constitucionais.

É uma questão sobretudo MORAL: o Brasil NÃO PODE ser conivente ou leniente com CRIMES DE GUERRA, crimes CONTRA A HUMANIDADE, e crime CONTRA A PAZ, iguais, semelhantes e similares, não na forma, mas nos efeitos, aos crimes dos nazistas na IIGM, e que os levaram ao Tribunal de Nuremberg.

Putin merece um Nuremberg só seu, que talvez não venha no quadro do TPI. Mas ele deveria ser condenado no tribunal da consciência universal, e o Brasil não poderia permanecer indiferente a essa grave questão MORAL.

Será feito? Repito: não acredito, e por isso me declaro PREVENTIVAMENTE em oposição à futura diplomacia de sua Majestade Lula III. 

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Brasília, 15/11/2022

Putin’s Newest Annexation Is Dire for Russia Too - Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic)

 O mais poderoso indiciamento do tirano de Moscou por sua contravenção direta à ordem internacional e pelos crimes de guerra, contra a paz e contra a humanidade perpetrados em sua guerra de agressão contra a Ucrânia.

Putin’s Newest Annexation Is Dire for Russia Too

His baldly illegitimate claim to four Ukrainian provinces shows contempt for the global order—and his own subjects.

By Anne Applebaum

The Atlantic, September 30, 2022

Vladimir Putin today announced his annexation of four provinces of Ukraine—four provinces that he does not fully control, that did not vote to join Russia, that have been the site of mass murder and mass deportation since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. With this statement, the Russian president is also declaring war. But this is not merely a war on Ukraine.

Putin’s war—Russia’s war—is also a war on a particular idea of world order and international law, an idea upheld not just by Europeans and North Americans, but by most of the rest of the world, indeed by the United Nations itself. One core principle of this world order is that larger countries should not be able to grab parts of smaller countries, that mass slaughter of whole populations is unacceptable, that borders have international significance and cannot be changed through violence or on one dictator’s whim. Putin already challenged this idea in 2014, when he annexed Crimea. At the time he also held a sham referendum, but he convinced many outsiders that it had some validity. Although some sanctions followed, the world largely gave him a pass. Commerce and diplomacy with Russia continued.

This time, Putin is no longer able even to pretend that the farcical votes he has staged in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson have any validity, and no one, anywhere, believes that they do. The simulation was played out: Armed men went house to housecollecting so-called ballots, and some people, left destitute by the war, were bribed in exchange for showing up to vote. But in regions where hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens have been evacuated, deported, or murdered, where violent conflict continues and where an active resistance is raging, nothing remotely like an actual vote could ever have taken place. Even as Putin was speaking in Moscow, the Ukrainians announced that they were surrounding and cutting off a large group of Russian soldiers in Lyman, a strategically significant city in Donetsk province.

Russia’s actions under these circumstances show contempt not only for international lawyers in European capitals, but also for Chinese politicians who like to talk about sovereignty and African diplomats who have agreed that borders matter, even when they are arbitrary. In the upside-down reality that Putin has created, he will now claim that Ukrainians, by defending their own land and their own people, are somehow attacking Russia. He will even raise the stakes, will try to frighten Ukraine and the West by calling Ukraine’s self-defense an existential threat to Russia that requires an extraordinary response—perhaps even a nuclear response, echoing a threat he has made repeatedly since he began his invasion.

This annexation is also more specifically a declaration of war against the democratic world, a statement of contempt for democracy itself. Putin has been treating democracy as a tool for decades, using fake parties, creating fake opponents, and rigging elections. For a long time, he and his spin doctors promoted a form of “managed democracy,” a system that allowed some space for public opinion, while at the same time ensuring that he always remained in power. With today’s announcement, he no longer pretends or plays games. This deliberate farce mocks the very idea of referenda, of voting, of popular opinion. Nothing about this act has any legitimacy, and that is also part of the point. In his world, there is no such thing as legitimacy. Only brutality matters.

Finally, this annexation marks the culmination of a two-decade war against any Russians whose vision of their country differs from his. Some of those Russians belong to ethnic minority groups—Dagestanis, Buryat, Tuvans, Crimean Tatars, all of whom have been subject to vigorous mobilization drives, as if Putin wants to use his genocidal war against Ukraine to eliminate them as well. Some simply want to live in a country governed by different rules, a country that does not have murderous designs on its neighbors, a country that is not a menace to the world. Although thousands of such people have fled the country over the past decade, the invasion deliberately sparked a new exodus. Putin’s propagandists have celebrated the departure of anti-war Russians as a form of cleansing; Putin himself has said that the nation should “spit them out like a midge that accidentally flew into their mouths.”

Since the war began, the crackdown at home has also accelerated, because the war provides the context in which dissent can be portrayed as treason, and because any criticism of the war is a crime. Newspapers, websites, social-media channels, and civic groups of all kinds have been shut down. More than 16,400 Russians have been detained in prison for protesting. In the past few days, some protesters have received draft notices after being taken to jail. Others are now the focus of special efforts to undermine and destroy them. Alexei Navalny, the Russian politician who came the closest to creating a grassroots, anti-Putin, prodemocracy movement, received a nine-year jail sentence in May and is now locked in a maximum-security prison. He has spent most of the past several weeks in an isolation cell, as punishment for tiny (or invented) infractions of jailhouse rules. Other inmates are forbidden to speak with him and even to look at him. But his anti-corruption foundation continues to function in exile (I am an unpaid member of its advisory board). And when he was allowed to speak in an internal prison court last week, Navalny responded to Putin’s call for the mobilization of military reservists without mincing words: “It is already clear that the criminal war that is going on is getting worse and deeper, and Putin is trying to involve as many people as possible in this. He wants to smear hundreds of thousands of people in this blood.”

Vladimir Kara-Murza, another opposition politician who has played an important role in campaigning for individual sanctions, is also in prison, where he remains equally defiant. “It continues to amaze me,” he told an interviewervia smuggled messages, “how many serious Western analysts buy the Kremlin’s propaganda on the ‘overwhelming popularity’ of Putin and of the war. If this were true, the authorities wouldn’t need to rig elections, muzzle the media, or imprison and murder their opponents. The Kremlin knows the real situation—and the only thing it has left in the toolbox to prevent protests in Russia is fear.”

Today’s annexation, along with the mobilization that has been launched to defend these occupied territories, has also been designed to increase that fear. The battle against independent thinkers is now expanding beyond Putin’s opponents and is reaching even Russians who felt too distant, too apathetic, or too afraid to protest in the past. If, once upon a time, the threat of the gulag was used to keep all Soviet citizens in a state of permanent fear, the threat of the war in Ukraine is now being used in exactly the same way against Putin’s subjects. The regime is now treating ordinary citizens exactly as if they were expendable prisoners, throwing untrained, poorly equipped men into the battlefield, where some are rumored to have already died. New draftees are being driven to empty fields with no shelter and no food, just as new prisoners were once abandoned in the 1930s to build their own labor camps. Putin, like Stalin, believes that his sinister, unbalanced idea of collective glory matters more than the prosperity, well-being, happiness, and even physical existence of ordinary Russians.

But nothing lasts forever: “Your time will pass,” Navalny told his jailers last week. Kara-Murza, in a prison interview published this week, said the same thing: “None of us knows exactly how and when the Putin regime will end—but we know that it will.”

And they are right. We don’t know how and when it will end. Nor do we know what kind of regime will follow. But there is nothing predestined about Putinism or his form of kleptocratic autocracy. There is nothing “forever” about the annexation of territories that aren’t even under full Russian control, and none of the people who were at the annexation ceremony today will live forever either. Russia’s sham annexation of Ukrainian land will end, whatever false words are spoken this week.

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

AGNU 2022: pelo fim do veto ao violador da Carta da ONU - Paulo Roberto de Almeida; Covas coletivas encontradas em Izyum libertada (Spectator)

 Está mais do que provado que as forças bárbaras de conquista e ocupação russas cometeram crimes de guerra e contra a humanidade, sob a responsabilidade do tirano de Moscou, que ainda perpetrou um crime contra a paz. Ou seja, Putin merece um Nuremberg só seu, pois cometeu os mesmos crimes que aqueles sob os quais foram julgados os líderes civis e militares nazistas em 1946, pelo Tribunal Internacional de Nuremberg. 

A primeira providência da próxima AGNU será discutir a suspensão, na Carta da ONU, do direito de veto para qualquer um dos cinco membros do Conselho de Segurança que violar qualquer um dos artigos dessa Constituição da Humanidade.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Covas coletivas encontradas em Izyum libertada

Por Svitlana Morenets

The Spectator, 15/09/2022

O exército russo recuou de Izyum, na região de Kharkiv, no fim de semana passado, após um contra-ataque da Ucrânia. Ao lado do alívio após a libertação da região vem uma compreensão mais profunda dos horrores da ocupação. A polícia continua encontrando os corpos de civis com vestígios de tortura em aldeias e cidades e ontem, uma vala comum de 25 soldados ucranianos e cerca de 460 novas sepulturas foram encontradas perto de Izyum em Kharkiv Oblast. A maioria deles não tem nomes – apenas números em cruzes de madeira feitas à mão.

A exumação dos corpos começou hoje, com jornalistas ucranianos e internacionais convidados a testemunhar a atrocidade. ‘Bucha, Mariupol, agora, infelizmente, Izyum... a Rússia deixa a morte em todos os lugares. E deve ser responsabilizada por isso”, disse Volodymyr Zelensky no discurso da noite passada à nação.

Serhii Bolvinov, investigador-chefe da polícia da região de Kharkiv, disse que algumas das vítimas na vala comum foram mortas a tiros, enquanto outras foram mortas por fogo de artilharia ou ataques aéreos. Muitos corpos – e causas de morte – ainda não foram identificados. Maksym Strelnyk, deputado do conselho da cidade de Izyum, disse que pelo menos 1.000 civis foram mortos durante a ocupação russa.

A polícia ucraniana, promotores e outros investigadores reunirão evidências de suspeitos de crimes de guerra russos. Enquanto isso, cerca de 10.000 moradores permanecem em Izyum, uma cidade onde mais de 80% de sua infraestrutura foi destruída – mas eles podem ser evacuados com a chegada do inverno pois as condições serão difíceis.

Russia locked up Vladimir Kara-Murza for telling the truth about Ukraine - Christian Caryl (WP)

A história de um líder oposicionista à ditadura de Vladimir Putin, o czar de todas as Rússia, e criminoso de guerra e tirano feroz contra o seu próprio povo.

Opinion

Russia locked up Vladimir Kara-Murza for telling the truth about Ukraine

By  Christian Caryl

Op-ed Editor/International

The Washington Post, July 28, 2022

On a cold spring evening in April, Russian opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza was parking outside his Moscow apartment building when five uniformed police officers surrounded his car. The officers yanked him from the vehicle and hustled him into a waiting van. Next thing he knew, he was occupying a 6-by-9-foot cell in Moscow’s notorious Khamovniki police station.

Initially, he was detained on a spurious charge: disobeying the police. But on April 22, 11 days after his arrest, Kara-Murza was indicted on a charge of “spreading deliberately false information” under a law passed in the wake of Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. It’s a charge that could bring 10 years in prison.

The charging document cited a speech that Kara-Murza, a Post contributing columnist, had given weeks earlier to the Arizona House of Representatives. His remarks accused Russian forces of dropping cluster bombs on residential areas in Ukraine and staging airstrikes on maternity wards, hospitals and schools. He did not mince words: “These are war crimes that are being committed by the dictatorial regime in the Kremlin against a nation in the middle of Europe.”

The atrocities Kara-Murza described have been verified by news organizations around the world and have led to international war crimes investigations. But Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin couldn’t bear the spectacle of a Russian citizen airing these uncomfortable facts — so it locked him up for telling the truth.

Read this essay in Russian: Кремль отправил Владимира Кара-Мурзу в тюрьму за правду об Украине

If telling the truth qualifies as a “crime,” it is one that the 40-year-old Kara-Murza has committed proudly and consistently. For two decades, he has been an outspoken opponent of the Putin regime. His efforts have come at a huge price: He was poisoned in 2015 and again in 2017, narrowly surviving both attempts on his life. Over the years, associates and friends have been attacked, jailed or killed — experiences that have hardened his ideological rejection of Putin’s Kremlin.

Yet he’s not afraid to say so. The day before his latest arrest, he told CNN in an April 10 interview that Russia’s current government “is a regime of murderers.”

Even when it has been clear that pursuing his ideals might put his life at risk, Kara-Murza — a historian and documentary filmmaker as well as a journalist and activist — has continued to campaign for human rights and liberal democracy. Meanwhile, many politicians in the West have abandoned these values, whether by appeasing dictators such as Putin or by eroding democratic principles in their own societies.

Kara-Murza didn’t have to take this path. Years ago, he settled his family — his wife, Evgenia, and three children, now ages 16, 13 and 10 — in a Northern Virginia suburb. He holds a British passport as well as a Russian one; he easily could have embraced a full-time life in the West. His friends often express dismay over his insistence on returning to Russia — but Kara-Murza maintained that he could not advocate for the rights and freedoms of the Russian people without enduring the same travails they face.

Even when it has been clear that pursuing his ideals might put his life at risk, Kara-Murza — a historian and documentary filmmaker as well as a journalist and activist — has continued to campaign for human rights and liberal democracy. Meanwhile, many politicians in the West have abandoned these values, whether by appeasing dictators such as Putin or by eroding democratic principles in their own societies.

Kara-Murza didn’t have to take this path. Years ago, he settled his family — his wife, Evgenia, and three children, now ages 16, 13 and 10 — in a Northern Virginia suburb. He holds a British passport as well as a Russian one; he easily could have embraced a full-time life in the West. His friends often express dismay over his insistence on returning to Russia — but Kara-Murza maintained that he could not advocate for the rights and freedoms of the Russian people without enduring the same travails they face.

Kara-Murza recently described his imprisonment as a kind of badge of honor worn by an illustrious line of Russian oppositionists before him. In a letter sent from prison, he cited the example of dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who proudly recalled being charged with “anti-Soviet activity”: “I wear these convictions like medals!”

Vladimir Kara-Murza, right, with Vladimir Bukovsky 

in the early 2000s.

 (Family photo)

“He’s one of the very few people of the new generation who could be called an heir of the [Soviet-era] dissident movement, of its ideals and its critiques,” says 68-year-old Aleksandr Podrabinek, who was a political prisoner for 5½ years in Soviet times. “He knows its history; he understands its meaning. He’s one of our dissident family.”

As Putin’s Russia backslides into a state resembling its Soviet past, Kara-Murza finds himself in a role that he knows well from his study of history. In the 20th century, dissidents such as Podrabinek used the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakiaand Afghanistan to illuminate the communist regime’s brutality. Now, Kara-Murza has become a prisoner of consciencein his own right for daring to oppose yet another cynical war.

The Russian opposition has produced many talented leaders over the years. The most prominent today is Alexei Navalny, a rousing populist who made a name for himself with highly effective online campaigns against the corruption of officialdom. Navalny, who was successfully building a national grass-roots organization until he was poisoned in 2020, is serving a nine-year sentence in a maximum-security penal colony.

Yet few can make the case with the same depth and rigor as Kara-Murza. And that makes him dangerous. Since Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Kara-Murza has argued that the war enjoys far less support among ordinary Russians than the Kremlin claims. Saying that out loud strikes at one of the regime’s most vulnerable points. “The regime is so afraid of the people,” his wife, Evgenia, told me. “It wants to create this image for the international community that everyone supports Putin’s actions in Ukraine, that Russia is a strong country, and that Putin’s leadership is approved by his population who stand behind him in everything that he does. None of that is true.” That’s why the Kremlin is cracking down, she says, on anyone who challenges the official narrative.

If Kara-Murza were free to speak, he’d scold me for making him the center of attention. I have edited his columns for The Post for five years — exactly 101 columns so far — and over those years, I’ve been honored to call him a friend. He shies away from attempts to single him out, instead redirecting attention to the plight of other democratic activists. Fluent in English and French as well as Russian, Kara-Murza often comes across as soft-spoken and cerebral — an image somewhat belied by his fondness for 1970s British TV comedy and a natural ease with people.

But there can be no mistaking the intensity of his quarrel with Russia’s regime. For 20 years, Kara-Murza has battled against Putin and everything he stands for — a conflict fueled by the two men’s radically divergent biographies. Putin chose a career in the KGB as a devoted servant of the Soviet system. The Kara-Murza family has long defined itself by its opposition to that system. Two of Kara-Murza’s ancestors — a great-grandfather and a great-great uncle — were shot by Stalin’s secret police.

[Vladimir Kara-Murza from jail: Russia will be free. I’ve never been so sure.]

Kara-Murza was born in September 1981 at the nadir of the Cold War. His first political mentor was his father, also named Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Soviet-era dissident who became a nationally known journalist during the 1990s. His parents divorced early in his childhood. Later, his mother, Elena Gordon, married a British citizen and took her teenage son with her to live in Britain.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, right, with his father, Vladimir Kara-Murza Sr., 

in St. Petersburg, Russia in the early 2000s. (Family photo)

At 16, while studying at British schools, Kara-Murza started working as a correspondent for a Moscow newspaper and other Russian media outlets, too. His work brought him into contact with a man who would become his political mentor: Boris Nemtsov, a liberal member of the Russian parliament who had served as a deputy prime minister under President Boris Yeltsin. Soon, Kara-Murza was helping Nemtsov organize visits to Britain; in 2000, he became one of Nemtsov’s parliamentary aides.

In 2003, Kara-Murza completed his undergraduate degree in history at Cambridge. Then he returned to Moscow, where he threw himself into the work of the liberal opposition. Officially a member of Nemtsov’s party, he campaigned for a seat in the national parliament. Just a few years into Putin’s rule, it was already clear that democrats faced an uphill battle, even if the tactics used against them were relatively benign. His opponents unplugged lights illuminating one of his campaign billboards, blocked distribution of his election pamphlets and turned off his microphone during a televised debate. Little surprise, Kara-Murza lost to a Putin-backed candidate.

In many respects, Russia’s fledgling democracy in the 1990s — complete with private property, elected government, freedom of assembly and of the press — was a remarkable achievement. It lasted more than a decade, longer than any such experiment in the previous thousand years.

But it also brought chaos. Many Russians came to identify post-Soviet democracy with runaway inflation, unpaid wages and social turmoil; organized criminals ran amok, and a tiny coterie of oligarchs seized control of much of the economy.

Vladimir Kara-Murza from jail: The worst nightmare for political prisoners

In the 2000s, the disillusioned initially welcomed Putin’s reassertion of state power even as he maintained some popular achievements of the Yeltsin era, such as the right to open a business or travel abroad. For Putin’s supporters, his dismantling of press freedom and representative government seemed an acceptable price to pay for stability. As Putin settled into office, however, the pro-democracy parties, riven by factionalism and private feuds, could do little to counter the Kremlin’s gradual restoration of the police state.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, left, with Boris Nemtsov at a conference of the 

Union of Right Forces party in Moscow in May of 2001. (Family photo)

Over time, Russians — especially younger ones — began to see signs of deepening stagnation. That sentiment exploded into mass protests in 2011, when Putin announced — without even a nod at consulting the voters — that he would return to the presidency after four years as prime minister (and showed what a sham it had been when he stepped down to comply with term limits). Russians in major cities took to the streets by the tens of thousands, at a moment when the Arab Spring was elsewhere reminding the world that sclerotic dictatorships are never as stable as they appear. The Kremlin, palpably unnerved, crushed the protests, with some demonstrators sentenced to long prison terms.

One source of the discontent stood out: the rampant corruption of the ruling elite. Those Yeltsin-era oligarchs who had accepted Putin’s rise to power had been joined at the top by a new class of ex-KGB billionaires, who used their proximity to the president to seize control of lucrative assets. Despite their nationalist rhetoric, they tended to park their ill-gotten gains overseas; economists recently estimated that some 50 percent of Russian wealth is stashed abroad. In 2009, the machinations of a coterie of corrupt police officials had led to the death in prison of an idealistic young Russian lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky. The ensuing quest for justice by one of his clients, the investor Bill Browder, would have far-reaching consequences — for Russian human rights abusers and for Kara-Murza, who soon joined the cause.

Until this time, sanctions on authoritarian regimes usually targeted entire industries or economic sectors — and ordinary people often ended up bearing the brunt. But when Browder sought justice for Magnitsky, he lobbied for legislation in the United States and elsewhere that would impose personal sanctions on individual Russian human rights abusers, banning them from travel to the West and allowing the seizure of their assets. In other words, the measure would hit them in their pocketbooks.

The law, named the Magnitsky Act, was passed by the U.S. Congress in 2012. Browder and his allies then lobbied for similar legislation in Canada, Britain and the European Union. Kara-Murza, helped by his status as one of the very few leading members of the Russian opposition who spoke fluent English, played a key role. “Vladimir was indispensable,” says David J. Kramer, a George W. Bush administration State Department official who assisted in the Magnitsky Act campaign. “No one can question his bona fides to speak personally directly about the abuses, if not the outright atrocities committed by the Putin regime.”

Putin saw the Magnitsky law as a threat to himself and his cronies. Browder, a U.S.-born British citizen, soon found himself fending off death threats, lawsuits and eight Interpol arrest warrants filed by the Russian government. But for Putin’s Russian critics, the risks were worse. In February 2015, Nemtsov was gunned down crossing a Moscow bridge just a few hundred feet from the Kremlin. Hours before the late-night attack, Nemtsov had given an interview in which he denounced Putin’s “mad, aggressive and deadly policy of war against Ukraine,” referring to Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and deployment of Russian troops.

The Russian government tried and convicted five Chechen men for Nemtsov’s murder — while suppressing evidence that suggested the killers had ties to the Kremlin. “This is personal for me,” Kara-Murza said in 2017. “Boris Nemtsov was my closest friend. He’s godfather to my younger daughter; that’s family in Russia. I know that for so many people, this is personal.”

Vladimir Kara-Murza 

lays flowers Feb. 27, 2021, 

near the place where 

Russian opposition leader

 Boris Nemtsov was gunned 

down six years earlier 

in Moscow. 

(Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP)

Despite entreaties from many friends and allies, Kara-Murza insisted on staying in Russia. A few months later, on May 26, 2015, soon after visiting a Moscow restaurant with a colleague, he began to feel violently ill. Suddenly, he was sweating and vomiting, his heart racing: “Within the space of 10 to 15 minutes, I went from feeling completely normal to being a really sick man,” he later told an interviewer.

Kara-Murza passed out before arriving at a Moscow hospital, where doctors discerned that his kidneys were shutting down. Other major organs followed. When his wife, Evgenia, arrived from the United States a day and a half later, doctors estimated his chances of survival at 5 percent.

Yet survive he did. Recovery was a long, slow process — rebuilding his strength involved relearning such basics as how to hold a spoon. A few months after the poisoning, Kara-Murza was invited to a reception at the British ambassador’s residence in Moscow, where one British lawmaker declared that he opposed passage of a Magnitsky Act-style law, saying he thought it would be bad for British business. As Browder tells the story, Kara-Murza, still relying on the aid of a cane, responded: “They tried to kill me over this thing, and you’re worried about doing a bit of business with Russia?”

As he recovered, Kara-Murza continued his opposition work. He traveled, organizing grass-roots activists for Open Russia, a pro-democracy group funded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch who was imprisoned for 10 years for defying Putin. Kara-Murza made a film about Nemtsov that celebrated his mentor’s achievements as a defender of democracy, screening it to audiences inside Russia and abroad. And he continued lobbying foreign governments to pass Magnitsky Act-style personal sanctions.

Then, on Feb. 1, 2017, he was attacked again. After eating in a Moscow cafe with a fellow activist, Kara-Murza suddenly began experiencing familiar symptoms: difficulty breathing, plummeting blood pressure, a racing heart rate. Before he lost consciousness, he managed to call Evgenia, who swiftly boarded a flight for Moscow. Before she arrived, doctors placed Kara-Murza in an artificial coma to aid their treatment of his failing lungs and kidney. Their diagnosis: “acute intoxication with an unknown substance.”

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Prison doesn’t give me many views of the sun

Kara-Murza fought his way back to health after the 2017 poisoning and again rejoined opposition efforts. In public appearances in Russia and elsewhere, he persisted in calling out the Putin regime for falsifying election results and other distortions of the truth — despite the obvious risk. He also began to write regularly for The Post. His opinion columns vividly portrayed Russia’s real political life, with all its complexity and turmoil, and its contradictions with the official image of a people seamlessly united behind a strong leader.

In a 2018 column about Putin’s suppression of political opponents, for example, Kara-Murza wrote: “A leader with real popular support would not be afraid of real competition at the ballot box.”

Vladimir Kara-Murza, 

recovering in 2017 after

 he was poisoned 

for the second time, 

is visited in the hospital 

by, from left, his wife, 

Evgenia; his lawyer 

and friend Vadim 

Prokhorov; and Aleksandr Podrabinek, an activist 

and Soviet-era dissident. 

(Family photo)

An impressive array of U.S. legislators has called for Kara-Murza’s release, as have politicians and human rights organizations around the world. “As I said at the time of Vladimir Kara-Murza’s arrest, the Kremlin’s charges against him are a cynical attempt to silence him,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this month. “Vladimir should be released, as should all of those who have been detained for doing nothing more than speaking the truth.” Fred Ryan, publisher of The Post, said: “The Biden administration and Congress must use all the levers at their disposal — including tougher sanctions on those closest to Putin — to secure Kara-Murza’s freedom immediately.”

Putin, however, shows little sign of relenting. On June 8, a Moscow court extended Kara-Murza’s pretrial detention by two months. His lawyer, Vadim Prokhorov, recently announced that investigators in Moscow opened another criminal case against Kara-Murza this month based on his alleged membership “in an undesirable organization."

All this has tragically vindicated Kara-Murza’s two decades of warnings about Putin. Meanwhile, the Magnitsky Act-style sanctions he has long advocated are serving as the model for a host of international measures punishing Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. An unprecedented wave of internal repression has put more than 16,000 Russians behind bars. And it has put Kara-Murza on a collision course with a ruthless dictator who acts as though he has little left to lose.

Yet Kara-Murza remains upbeat. In a recent letter from prison, he characteristically noted others who have dared to speak out against tyranny. “Each of the thousands of Russian antiwar protesters is standing up not only for the people of Ukraine and for the international rule of law but also for the future of our own country,” he wrote. “Each one is giving another reason to hope that a renewed, reformed post-Putin Russia can one day take its place in the community of democratic nations — and in a Europe that would finally become whole, free and at peace.”

Such optimism might sound misplaced at a moment when Russia is once again reverting to despotism. Knowing Vladimir Kara-Murza, though, I know how he would respond to my skepticism: The night, he would say, is always darkest before the dawn.