Hours after Alexei Navalny was buried in Moscow, his body brought from a grim Siberian jail, Evgenia Kara-Murza, who is married to another Russian opposition leader serving a 25-year sentence in another grim Siberian jail, is perfectly composed.
On Friday, images of Navalny’s body in an open casket were beamed around the world, but if these scenes had brought home to Evgenia Kara-Murza the risk to her husband and her family, she wasn’t showing it.
In fact, she’s fresh out of a meeting with Britain’s foreign secretary, David Cameron. “I was actually with him when the funeral was taking place,” she says. “It was arranged two weeks ago so it was a total coincidence. But can you believe it’s taken two years for the British government to meet with me? It took them a year to make even a statement about his arrest.”
It’s a fact that Bill Browder, an American businessman turned activist calls “utterly shameful”, not least because Vladimir Kara-Murza is a British citizen. Since Navalny’s death, he’s the most high-profile politician imprisoned in Russia but he spent his teenage years in Britain after his mother married an Englishman, studying at Cambridge University before returning to Moscow.
“He looked around and said, ‘Britain will be fine without me whereas Russia … Russia needs my help’,” says Evgenia.
Browder became close to Kara-Murza when they travelled around the world together successfully advocating for western governments to sanction Russian businessmen and politicians via “Magnitsky Acts”. “In my fantasy, Alexei Navalny was going to be president and Vladimir would be prime minister,” says Browder.
He also got to know Evgenia well and her trip to London was supported by his foundation. “She’s amazing, unbelievable. Since the day he was arrested in April 2022, she’s been on the road, talking to politicians and parliamentarians to raise the awareness of this case and get him out of jail.
“Unlike other political prisoners, the after-effects of two assassination attempts have left Vladimir extremely vulnerable. If he’s not released, he’ll probably die.”
The assassination attempts – two separate poisonings in 2015 and 2017 – are one of many similarities between Kara-Murza and Navalny. Like him, Kara-Murza was arrested on trumped-up charges, in his case for “treason”. He has also been exiled to a Siberian penal colony and repeatedly isolated in a punishment cell. And according to an investigation by Bellingcat, he was poisoned by the same FSB team that used the prohibited nerve agent, Novichok, on Navalny.
Evgenia and their three children have lived in Washington DC since Kara-Murza, a journalist by profession, was posted there in the mid-2000s but he continued to base himself in Russia, going back even after he was poisoned. He left briefly to celebrate his daughter’s birthday in spring 2022 and was arrested shortly after his return, although Evgenia describes this incident almost in terms of relief. “We thought it was more likely he would be murdered.”
It’s not just Vladimir Kara-Murza who bears similarities to Alexei Navalny – the two men were friends and Navalny asked Kara-Murza to testify at his trial – but there’s also a similarity between their wives. They’ve never met but Evgenia’s cool-headed resolve is strikingly like Yulia Navalnaya’s blend of steel and dignity. And just as Navalnaya has been forced into the spotlight following her husband’s murder, Kara-Murza has become a fierce advocate for her husband and his cause: the need for western governments to take action against Putin.
But Britain has, until now, turned its back. It’s not been helped by what she calls the “chaos” of the Foreign Office. “How many foreign ministers have you had since he was arrested? There was Liz Truss and James Cleverly and then was there someone else? I forget. And we only now finally get a meeting with Lord Cameron.”
Last week, Maria Pevchikh, the chair of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, spoke publicly about the diplomatic efforts to free him as part of a prisoner swap. He was due to be exchanged, she has claimed, with a Russian hitman held in a German jail, along with two US nationals. If Kara-Murza knew anything about this, she’s not saying.
What she is saying, however, is that the UK government needs to change its position. “It refuses to negotiate prisoner or hostage swaps. It says this will encourage the taking of more hostages. This is categorically not true and it has to change.”
She is blistering, too, about how the UK enabled Putin’s regime to continue for so long, turning a blind eye to the vast amounts of money and reputations being laundered and how, even now, the mansions of Putin’s oligarchs sit empty in London. “Why aren’t they using that money?” she demands.
The situation for her husband is urgent. Since his 2015 poisoning, Kara-Murza has suffered from a nerve condition called polyneuropathy that is worsening by the day.
And the stakes are rising. Not just with Navalny’s death but with the paralysis in the US in providing support to Ukraine and the spectre of a Trump victory and what that would mean. “Biden has said that Russia will face ‘devastating consequences’ for Navalny’s murder, but where are they?” All it has done, she says, is to underline Putin’s impunity.
While her husband’s bravery has shown the world what Putin’s regime is really like, with what she calls its Stalinist repression of political dissent, the west is still failing to understand Russia’s threat to its own security.
According to Browder, we are running out of time. The “terrifying” prospect of another Trump presidency is potentially just months away. Meanwhile, Evgenia Kara-Murza is staying on the road.
She puts on her coat to leave. “I think if things are ever sorted out,” she says, “it’ll be the women who do it.”
