Status: 04/12/2022 08:05 a.m
According to his lawyer, Kremlin critic Kara-Mursa has been arrested. The 40-year-old had repeatedly criticized the Russian war against Ukraine in recent weeks.
The Russian opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Mursa was arrested by the police yesterday in front of his apartment building in Moscow. Kara-Mursa had to stay overnight in a police station, his lawyer Vadim Prokhorov said. He was charged with resisting state authority. According to Russian law, this can result in a prison sentence of up to 15 days.
Nothing was initially known about other allegations. Kara-Mursa has repeatedly criticized the Russian attack on Ukraine in recent weeks.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed concern at Kara-Mursa’s arrest. “We are closely monitoring the situation and demand his immediate release,” he wrote on Twitter.
Survived mysterious poisoning
The 40-year-old politician and journalist is a prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin. Kara-Mursa has twice narrowly survived mysterious poisonings for which he blames the Russian secret service.
According to research by the investigative group Bellingcat, Kara-Mursa was being pursued by agents of the Russian domestic secret service FSB, who are said to be involved in the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Kara-Mursa was hospitalized with symptoms of poisoning in 2015 and 2017. He was an associate of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered in 2015, and of oligarch and government critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In the first incident, he almost died of kidney failure. Kara-Mursa suspects he was poisoned. This has not been officially established.
He was admitted in 2017 with similar, sudden symptoms and put into a healing coma. His wife said doctors confirmed he had been poisoned. Kara-Mursa is one of the few prominent opposition figures still living in Russia.