Russian politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, currently serving a 25-year prison sentence for his outspoken criticism of the war in Ukraine, assigned personal blame for Alexey Navalny’s death to Vladimir Putin in a series of posts on X on Tuesday.
In the posts, Kara-Murza blamed Putin for the long-running persecution campaign against Navalny, saying he personally ordered Navalny be poisoned in 2020, condemned to years in a penal colony and subjected to “torturous conditions”.
Putin, Kara-Murza wrote, had “brought death for all 25 years of his rule”, citing a series of examples: the 1999 Russian apartment bombings, the Second Chechen War, the 2002 Moscow theatre hostage crisis, the 2004 Beslan school siege, and the wars in Georgia, Syria and Ukraine.
“The best are dying — the bravest, most sincere and most caring,” Kara-Murza said, while the “vengeful, cowardly, greedy old man” Putin kept “clinging onto power with a deathly grip, destroying anyone he sees as a threat to his rule”.
“He must be stopped,” Kara-Murza concluded. “And only Russian society itself can do it.”
Kara-Murza, who survived two poisoning attempts in 2015 and 2017, was sentenced to 25 years in a penal colony in May for “treason”, spreading “false information” about the Russian army and working with an “undesirable organisation”.
In January he was transferred to solitary confinement at a prison with harsher conditions. As Kara-Murza suggested, the authorities believed he had become “too comfortable” at the facility where he was initially imprisoned.
