Putin must lose war and “face” in Ukraine, Russian opposition leader Kara-Murza tells AFP

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-Murza, one of the main opponents of the Russian president, recently released 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, said in an interview with AFP.

And “it is very important that we do not allow Vladimir Putin 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 released last month in a prisoner swap.

He says he is confident he will one day return to his home country because Mr Putin's “regime” will not last, provided there is an end to Western “realpolitik” towards the Russian president, which has made him “the monster he is today”.

“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 stay in power, in a year or 18 months, we will be talking about another conflict or another catastrophe,” he warned.

– “Solidarity” with the 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.

Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomes Vadim Krassikov, a member of the Russian intelligence services convicted in 2021 in Germany for the assassination in Berlin of a former Chechen separatist commander, and exchanged with other Russian agents for Russian opponents and foreign prisoners, on August 1, 2024 in Moscow © POOL – Mikhail VOSKRESENSKIY

“It won't be easy, it won't be quick, but we know it's possible,” said the opponent, 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 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 rebuild our country from the ruins that Putin will leave behind.”

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.”

– “Avenir en marche” –

Vladimir Kara-Mourza, whose former minister and opponent Boris Nemtsov, assassinated in Moscow in 2015, was the mentor, said he was not worried about his safety.

The word +security+ is not part of the vocabulary of someone who opposes the Putin regime in Russia,” observes the forty-year-old, who was himself poisoned twice before his arrest in 2022.

Russian opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Mourza and his wife Evguenia, September 9, 2024 in Paris © AFP – JOEL SAGET

“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 narrates. “After months of solitary confinement, your mind starts playing tricks on you. I thought maybe I had made it all up,” he continued, saying he was 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 said.

The “rage” against the “crimes” committed by the Putin regime in Russia and Ukraine has also strengthened his wife Evguenia, who accompanied him during the interview with AFP in Paris. From the United States, where she lived with their children, Mrs. Kara-Mourza had never stopped fighting for her release.

“The rage I have felt all these years… exceeds any fears I could have,” she assured, saying she wanted to continue fighting for the release of other political prisoners.

“I would not be here talking to you if it were not for Evguenia,” Vladimir concluded.

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