(Paris) Vladimir Putin must lose the war and “face” in Ukraine, the end of his reign being the only solution for peace, said on Monday Vladimir Kara-Mourza, one of the main opponents of the Russian president, recently freed as part of a prisoner exchange.
“It is very important that we do not let Vladimir Putin win the war against Ukraine,” Kara-Murza, who was due to meet French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday, told AFP in an interview.
And “it is very important that Vladimir Putin is not allowed to save face at the end of this war,” he insisted.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was serving a 25-year sentence in a Siberian penal colony, is among a group of Russian dissidents and foreign nationals freed last month in a prisoner swap.
He says he is confident that he will one day return to his home country, because Mr Putin’s “regime” will not last, provided that Western “realpolitik” towards the Russian president, which has made him “the monster he is today”, ends.
“Enough realpolitik,” he said.
“If, God forbid, the Putin regime is allowed to present the outcome of this war as a victory for it and to remain in power, in a year or 18 months we will be talking about another conflict or another catastrophe,” he warned.
“Solidarity” with Ukrainians
Mr Kara-Murza, 43, who has dual Russian and British citizenship, said he would be “honoured” to visit Ukraine and meet President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying links should be built between Russia’s pro-democracy movement and Ukraine.
“We will have to find ways to live together and overcome this horrible tragedy that the Putin regime has unleashed,” he said.
“It won’t be easy, it won’t be quick, but we know it’s possible,” said the opposition leader, who says he felt a “special solidarity” with the Ukrainian officers locked up in the same detention camp as him, even though he couldn’t communicate with them.
He himself was “absolutely certain” that he would die in the Siberian penal colony where he was being held. Until one morning he was suddenly put on a plane to Moscow and then exchanged with other prisoners in the Turkish capital, Ankara, he said.
“No one ever asked us for our consent,” he said. “They put us on a plane like cattle and threw us out of Russia.”
However, “not only is Putin’s regime not eternal, but… I think it will end in the very near future.” At that point, “we will have a gigantic task to accomplish to rebuild our country from the ruins that Putin will leave.”
Recalling the collapse of the tsarist regime in 1917 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Mr. Kara-Murza argued that “major political changes in Russia come suddenly and unexpectedly, and no one is ever prepared for them.”
“Future in motion”
Vladimir Kara-Murza, whose mentor was former minister and opposition figure Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in Moscow in 2015, said he was not worried about his safety.
The word “security” is not part of the vocabulary of someone who opposes Putin’s regime in Russia, observes the 40-year-old, who was himself poisoned twice before his arrest in 2022.
“But whether Putin likes it or not, the future is on the way,” he assured.
He himself struggles to describe the emotions he felt when he learned of the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in February in another prison.
“I heard it on the radio,” he says. “After months of solitary confinement, your mind starts playing tricks on you. I thought maybe I had made it all up,” he continues, saying he is certain that Navalny was killed on Putin’s orders.
“Any Western leader who shakes hands with Vladimir Putin is shaking hands with a murderer,” he says.
The “rage” against the “crimes” committed by the Putin regime in Russia and Ukraine has also strengthened his wife Evgenia, who accompanied him during the interview with AFP in Paris. From the United States, where she lived with their children, Mme Kara-Mourza had never stopped fighting for his release.
“The rage I have felt all these years… exceeds any fears I could have,” she said, saying she wanted to continue fighting for the release of other political prisoners.
“I wouldn’t be here talking to you if it weren’t for Evgenia,” Vladimir concluded.