Kara-Murza defends prisoner exchanges, saying they are crucial to securing the release of more political detainees in Russia.
Western governments and the exiled Russian opposition should begin laying the groundwork for Russia's democratic transition after President Vladimir Putin finally leaves office, said Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian opposition politician.
Seven weeks after being released from a Siberian penal colony in a historic East-West swap, Kara-Murza did not say how he thought Putin would leave, but said Friday that Russia should not waste what he said would be a narrow window of time to establish a democratic government, as he said it did after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
“We need to learn from those past mistakes, from those past lessons, to make sure we don’t repeat these failures the next time a window of opportunity for change opens in Russia,” Kara-Murza told reporters at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London, in his first public appearance in the UK since being released on August 1.
“None of us know exactly when or under what circumstances, but it will happen in the very foreseeable future. And next time, we must get it right.”
Putin, 71, has been in office as president or prime minister since 1999. He began a new six-year term as president in May and dominates the political landscape in Russia, with leading opposition figures in prison or in exile.
Kara-Murza, 43, has become one of the most prominent voices of the opposition in exile since his release from prison, where he was serving a 25-year sentence for treason for publicly opposing the war in Ukraine. He holds Russian and British passports.
“Vladimir Putin must not be allowed to win this war in Ukraine. Even more, he must not be allowed to get out of this war by saving face,” he said on Friday.
He argued that the West should be preparing a plan for a future democratic Russia, which should include Western leaders communicating to the Russian people that the West is with them against Putin, Kara-Murza said.
Ensuring the release of more prisoners of conscience – who he said number around 1,300 in Russia – is crucial.
“I wake up every morning and go to sleep every night thinking about all the others who are still left behind,” the politician said.
He singled out Alexei Gorinov, 63, the first person jailed under Russia's wartime censorship laws, and Maria Ponomarenko, a Siberian journalist currently on hunger strike in prison, among those in urgent need of support.
Asked if he was concerned that prison exchanges could encourage Putin to take more prisoners, Kara-Murza said he would continue taking prisoners anyway “because he is afraid of the truth.”
Arguing that the August 1 prisoner swap had saved “16 human souls” from the “hell” of Russian prisons, he added: “It was not a prisoner swap, it was a life-saving operation and we must see it this way.”
