The Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza is “worried” about Donald Trump potentially becoming US President and giving Vladimir Putin a “face-saving exit” from war in Ukraine.
Kara-Murza, who was jailed in Russia for opposing Putin’s invasion – but then freed in last month’s historic prisoner swap – is concerned that growing international weariness over Ukraine could strengthen Putin’s regime.
The joint Russian-British national met Sir Keir Starmer on Friday during his first visit to the country since being released.
Speaking at a press conference, after meeting the Prime Minister, Kara-Murza said emphatically that Putin “must not be allowed to win the war in Ukraine”.
The pro-democracy campaigner, who is believed to have been poisoned twice by Russian agents in the last decade, said that Putin’s rule has brought “death, blood, suffering, pain, murder and war”.
He hopes this will soon be ended by a popular uprising, arguing that the regime’s downfall is the only way to secure lasting peace across Europe.
Asked by i if he is alarmed about the prospect of a Trump victory at the polls in November, he said: “Yes, I am worried.”
He explained his fears that “growing fatigue” about supporting Ukraine and opposing Putin is becoming more evident not just in the US but across Europe.
“It’s understandable,” he said at the London event, hosted by the defence think tank Rusi. “People are tired, people want it over, people just want it to end – some people in any way.
“But I just hope people realise that if this is just frozen and pushed over, that’s not going to be an end. That’s just delaying it and making it worse a couple of years down the line.
“We know from history what appeasement of dictators leads to. We know from Western dealings with Vladimir Putin over the last 25 years what appeasement to dictators leads to.”
Only democracy in Russia can genuinely end war, says dissident
Numerous former high-ranking UK diplomats have told i this year that Trump’s attitude to Ukraine and Russia could harm British security, especially if he decides to reduce US participation in Nato or even pull out.
Kara-Murza said on Friday: “If this war is ended on Putin’s terms, all that means is that in a year or two from now, there will be another one.”
The only way to stop this happening, he believes, would be to have a democratic Russia that “respects rights and freedoms” at home and abroad.
In Trump’s debate with his presidential rival Kamala Harris last week, the Republican refused to declare whether he wants Ukraine to win the war, saying merely: “I want the war to stop.”
Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, said last week that if they win, their administration would seek a “peaceful settlement” to end the war quickly.
“What it probably looks like is the current line of demarcation between Russia and Ukraine, that becomes like a demilitarised zone,” he said in an interview.
Vance did not explain which side control this area, saying only that it would be “heavily fortified, so the Russians don’t invade again”. He added that Ukraine would need to drop its ambitions to join the West’s Nato alliance, which has been a key demand by Putin.
Trump’s reluctance to support Ukraine seemed evident again when he merely said that he will “probably” meet the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, when he visits the US next week for a UN Security Council meeting on the invasion.
Zelensky has admitted that dealing with Trump will be “hard work” if he is elected in November.
The cost of defying Putin
- The Cambridge-educated Vladimir Kara-Murza began raising awareness about Putin’s gradual dismantling of democracy in Russia as a journalist, working in London and Washington as well as Moscow.
- He became a friend of the former Russian deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered in a shooting near the Kremlin in February 2015 after speaking out against Putin.
- Later that year, Kara-Murza fell ill with his first suspected poisoning. Doctors gave him just a 5 per cent chance of surviving. When he eventually came out of a medically-induced coma, he was unable even to hold a spoon at first.
- In 2017, suffering from the same symptoms, he was once again placed on a ventilator and went into a coma.
- The FBI believes both incidents were the result of “intentional poisoning”. An investigation by Bellingcat together with The Insider and the BBC in 2021 revealed that he had been followed by members of Russia’s FSB security service.
- He and his wife Evgenia Kara-Murza moved their family home to the US many years ago over safety concerns. But the dissident continued returning to Russia to support the opposition movement, leading to his arrest in April 2022. He was later given a prison sentence of 25 years.
Faith that Russian civilians will one day stand in front of tanks
Kara-Murza thanked i on Friday for publishing an interview with him while he was locked up – in which he replied to questions in handwritten notes, sent back from his cell.
He said he was grateful to the anti-Putin campaigner Bill Browder and thousand of supporters inside Russia who wrote letters to him, ensuring he “never felt forgotten”.
Asked about the chances of a popular uprising happening in Russia against Putin, Kara-Murza admitted this is not likely right now.
But he said: “When the moment comes, I have no doubt there will be one, just as we saw in August 1991 when hundreds of thousands of peaceful, unarmed people went out on the streets of Moscow and literally stood in front of the tanks, and the tanks stopped and turned away.”
He added: “It wasn’t happening just two or three years before, because the conditions weren’t there. They aren’t there in Russia today, but it doesn’t mean they won’t be there in a few month’s time or in a couple of years.”
Kara-Murza expressed frustration that many Putin-allied oligarchs were allowed to do business in the UK in the years leading up to the full-scale invasion, referring to the British capital as “Londongrad”.
He added that it was unacceptable that so many close relatives of Russian government members are still able to travel and live in Europe, calling for further sanctions.
He accused the regime of the “assassination” of Russia’s most prominent opposition leader Alexei Navalny earlier this year.
But he dismissed concerns that there is no remaining opposition figure who is strong and popular enough to potentially replace Putin and lead genuine reforms of the country.
Russia needs to become a parliamentary democracy, he explained, rather than seeking to simply replace “a bad tsar with a good tsar”.
‘What could be worse than a deranged dictator with a nuclear bomb?’
Some members of the Russian opposition have suggested there is a danger that Putin could be replaced by someone even more dangerous in a military coup if the invasion of Ukraine falters.
Oleg Orlov, who was freed in the same prisoner swap as Kara-Murza, told i last month that it was “quite possible” an even more extreme “fascist” military commander could try to overthrow Putin.
The journalist Mikhail Zygar agrees that Putin could be ousted by an intelligence figure who is “even more paranoid than he is”.
Kara-Murza said the world cannot allow Putin to stay in power because of such fears.
He said: “What could be worse than a deranged dictator with a nuclear bomb who is destroying a peaceful country in the middle of Europe, who is imprisoning hundreds and hundreds of people, whose is murdering his political opponents? Can anything be worse than that – really? I’d like to see what it is. That argument is totally false.”
He diplomatically swerved a question about the ongoing debate on whether Ukraine should be allowed to use the UK’s Storm Shadow missiles and other long-range weapons to strike military targets deep inside Russian territory, and on the merits of Ukraine’s offensive in Russia’s Kursk region.
But he said: “All of these tragedies, all of this suffering, all of this pain that has been inflicted on the people of Ukraine, on the people of Russia, there’s one culprit in all of this. His name is Vladimir Putin.”
He admitted that much of Russian society had been culpable in allowing Putin to establish a dictatorship in their country without offering much resistance.
But he said Western leaders also needed to face up to their responsibilities, because they “enabled Putin and appeased Putin and continued to conduct business as usual with Putin.”
He referenced the infamous quote from George W Bush in 2001, when the then US President said that he had looked his Russian counterpart in the eye and was “able to get a sense of his soul”. Bush called Putin “straightforward and trustworthy”, though he later admitted he regretted saying this.
He criticised Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for declaring a “reset” with Putin, and European nations for “buying gas from him”. He said: “They bear a lot of responsibility for allowing the Putin regime to grow into the monster that it is today.”