It’s not encouraging, but there is word from Vladimir Kara-Murza’s wife Evgenia . . . which I suppose is better than the long stretches of silence we’ve come to expect from the Putin regime.

We know — but only learned after the fact — that on Thursday, July 4th, Kara-Murza was transferred from his “punishment cell” in the “special regime” prison colony at Omsk, Siberia, to the adjoining prison hospital, where he was held incommunicado for six days. Even his attorneys, who flew the 1,000 miles from Moscow to Omsk to meet with him, were told that he was unavailable and “still being evaluated.” Finally, on Wednesday, July 11th, his local Omsk counsel was able to see him, reporting that he was “stable” but “angry.”

And now another six days have passed with no updates. If anyone has been able to contact him since the 11th, I haven’t seen it reported in the mass media. But Evgenia Kara-Murza is not being quiet. She has described her reaction to the first news of his having been moved:

“I was very scared. You know, we’ve seen this before. Vladimir is a personal enemy of the Russian state. He still has the longest sentence served in modern Russia for political reasons, and his sentence might actually get longer in the coming months, years, because I think that they’re about to open a fourth criminal case against him. So, 25 years is not the limit for the Putin regime, and I know how they see him and I see how they treat him..” [Tom Watling, Independent (UK), July 16, 2024.]

But knowing that her husband was still alive brought little relief to Mrs. Kara-Murza. “When you think of a hospital, you think of a safe place, right? This hospital has nothing to do with what you think of as a hospital. He’s still in solitary. And the fact that he says that he’d rather be in his solitary cell at the prison colony of a strict regime, I think says a lot. Everything else is just as it was at the strict regime prison colony, only now he can barely see his lawyer on top of everything else and I am sure that he’s not being provided actual help.” [Watling Interview, id.]

Evgenia Kara-Murza has said she fears that time is “running out” for her husband, and that this transfer to the hospital is further evidence of Russia’s power over him. “There is no one else, besides the late Navalny, who is not allowed out of solitary for almost a year. So yes, of course, every time he disappears, even for a short period of time, I am extremely worried.” [Id.]

Knowing what happened to Alexei Navalny in February — when he was reported by the authorities at his prison camp to have died of “sudden death syndrome” — can anyone blame her?

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
7/17/24