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Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza was arrested near his home in Moscow. He previously survived two poisonings in Russia. Kara-Murza was taken to the police department in Moscow’s Khamovniki district for unknown charges, according to Ilya Yashin, an opposition colleague of Kara-Murza and former head of the Krasnoselsky municipal district in Moscow.
«Apparently, Kara-Murza was taken to the Khamovniki police department, where lawyer V. Prokhorov is going. I can assume that the detention is related to an administrative case (in the case of a criminal case, there would be a search and interrogation in the ICR). Most likely, we are talking about some kind of anti-war statement in the press or in social networks.»
The same day Kara-Murza appeared in a CNN video criticizing Russia’s “regime of murderers”.
“I have absolutely no doubt that the Putin regime will end over this war in Ukraine, doesn’t mean it’s gonna happen tomorrow. The two main questions are time and price and by price, I do not mean monetary – I mean the price of human blood and human lives and it has already been horrendous, but the Putin regime will end over this and there will be a democratic Russia after Putin,” Kara-Murza said.
In May 2015 and February 2017, Vladimir Kara-Murza, a well-known Russian politician, filmmaker and an outspoken critic of the Russian president Vladimir Putin, suffered two similar near-fatal medical emergencies. Both left him in a prolonged coma with severe shutdown of his vital functions. Despite Kara-Murza’s suspicions of being poisoned as retaliation for his political activities, Russian authorities refused to initiate criminal proceedings into either case. Two Russian hospital reports and three international examinations have concluded that the incidents were caused by intoxication with an unidentified substance. The exact cause and source of the poisonings has remained a mystery.
In a report prepared jointly with Bellingcat and Der Spiegel (Germany), we investigated the possible role of the two FSB units in two near-fatal poisonings of Russian politician.