Murder, poisoning, exile: how Putin makes life difficult for his opponents

After the 25-year prison sentence of the long-time opponent Vladimir Kara-Murza Monday, a look back at the repression that has hit the great detractors of Russian President Vladimir Putin since he came to power in 2000.

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Murdered

Former Deputy Prime Minister, tipped for a time to succeed President Boris Yeltsin against Vladimir Putin, Boris Nemtsov had become in the 2000s a major detractor of the Russian president.

In 2014, he opposed the annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin’s military support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Less than a year later, in February 2015, Nemtsov was shot four times in the back on a bridge a few dozen meters from the Kremlin. He was 55 years old.

His supporters have accused the Chechen satrap Ramzan Kadyrov of ordering it, which he denies. Five Chechens have nevertheless been sentenced for this murder, without the sponsor having ever been officially identified.

Ten years earlier, in October 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, another well-known critic of MM. Putin and Kadyrov, had been shot dead in the lobby of her apartment building in Moscow.

This journalist Novaya Gazetathe country’s main independent media, had for years documented and denounced the crimes of the Russian army in Chechnya.

imprisoned

Other critics narrowly avoided death and ended up in jail.

Alexei Navalnya 46-year-old anti-corruption activist, was the victim of serious poisoning in Siberia in 2020, which he attributes to the Kremlin, which the latter denies.

When he returned to Russia in January 2021, after recovering in Germany, he was immediately arrested. He has been serving a nine-year prison sentence since March for fraud charges, which he considers trumped up.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, 41, says he has survived two poisonings in the past. On Monday, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison, found guilty of “high treason”, “false information” about the army and illegal work for an “undesirable” organization.

Another well-known critic, Evgeni Roizman, 60, former mayor of the city of Yekaterinburg, was arrested several times and then released. He is accused of having “discredited” the army and faces several years in prison during a trial which opens at the end of April.

In December, another known opponent, Ilia Iachine39, was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for denouncing “the murder of civilians” in the Ukrainian town of Boutcha, near Kyiv, where the Russian army has been accused of abuses, which Moscow denies .

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Exiles

The vast majority of opposition figures who remained in Russia are imprisoned. The others fled.

Mikhail Khodorkovskya former oil magnate, spent 10 years in prison after opposing Mr. Putin in the early 2000s. Since his release in 2013, the ex-oligarch has taken refuge in London, from where he finances opposition platforms.

Many supporters of Mr. Khodorkovsky, but also of Alexei Navalny, have left Russia since 2021, a year which marked a sharp acceleration in repression.

This repression has intensified since the offensive in Ukraine, which also pushed thousands of opposition supporters, not just its executives, into exile.

“Foreign Agents”

Those who have escaped death or prison risk another punishment: being designated “foreign agents.”

In recent years, this infamous label, which evokes the lexicon of Stalinist terror, has been attached to dozens of media, NGOs, journalists, activists or artists.

This status obliges them to submit to Kafkaesque constraints. In particular, they must indicate their quality of“foreign agents” in all publications, under pain of sanctions.

Last winter, the NGO Memorial, co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize and pillar of the defense of human rights, was dismantled by order of the Russian justice for having violated the law on “agents of the foreign”.