BRUSSELS -- The wife of Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza said her husband has been held in solitary confinement for the last six months in a jail cell that is just a few square meters with a single stool, a tiny window covered with bars, and a bed that folds into the wall.
Yevgenia Kara-Murza, speaking in an interview on April 10 with Current Time, said Russian prison authorities initially called it a punitive isolation cell but later renamed it an EPKT, an acronym that stands for single-premise punitive cell. Most likely that was because Russian law does not allow an inmate to be held in a punitive cell for more than 15 days, she said.
Vladimir Kara-Murza in a Russian courtroom (file photo)
“Therefore, they just renamed the cell to make it legitimate,” Kara-Murza told Current Time, the Russian-language network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
Kara-Murza described her husband’s situation one day before the second anniversary of his arrest for criticizing President Vladimir Putin and his decision to invade Ukraine.
After his arrest on April 11, 2022, he was charged with discrediting the Russian military after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He was later additionally charged with treason over remarks he made in speeches outside Russia that criticized Kremlin policies.
He is serving a 25-year sentence -- the longest jail term handed to a Kremlin opponent in post-Soviet Russia -- in a penal colony in Omsk.
Yevgenia Kara-Murza spoke with Current time about her husband’s detention after appearing at a joint press conference at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, with the relatives of other people held in Russian jails for opposing the regime.
She said that he is given writing tools and allowed to take a walk alone in a tiny yard each day. The only human communication he has is with his lawyer, she added. But in letters to his two children, he always jokes, she said, describing such things as cats sunbathing on the metal mesh over the outdoor space that he walks in.
But on a more serious note, she said Kara-Murza has not received any medical assistance for at least six months. Her husband has a condition called polyneuropathy, which developed after he fell deathly ill on two separate occasions in Moscow -- in 2015 and 2017-- with symptoms consistent with poisoning.
Polyneuropathy is a painful condition in which the nerves in the extremities slowly die. It will continue to progress in the conditions that Kara-Murza currently is in, Yevgenia Kara-Murza said, adding that she believes solitary confinement cells such as the EPKT are used intentionally by the Russian authorities for inmates with medical conditions “to make sure that their health state gets even worse.”
This was the case for former Moscow municipal lawmaker Aleksei Gorinov, who is serving a seven-year prison sentence handed down in July 2022 for his stance against Russia's aggression against Ukraine, and for noted historian Yury Dmitriyev, who is serving a lengthy sentence on charges related to photographs of his foster daughter, she said.
They have been sent to punitive cells many times on “absolutely trumped-up reasons,” Yevgenia Kara-Murza said, adding that opposition politician Aleksei Navalny was treated similarly before he died in February.
Yevgenia Kara-Murza suggested the world should respond to Russia’s treatment of jailed opposition politicians by calling its presidential election in March illegitimate.
“It will be very important if the international community calls the situation what it is, calls Putin what he is: a usurper, dictator, and illegal leader of the Russian Federation, who, of course, did not win the election because all his real rivals either had to leave the country…were put behind bars, or were murdered like Boris Nemtsov and Aleksei Navalny,” she said.
A rejection of Putin as a partner on the international stage also would be an expression of solidarity with the Russians who have been locked up by the regime or who fled the country but continue to work as activists, journalists, and volunteers.
She also called on the European Parliament to appoint a special envoy on the rights of political prisoners in Russia. The envoy would be able to meet with the relatives of the people who are being held and share information about political repression.
She believes that the release of her husband and other opponents of the Kremlin who are held in Russian jails could come when the war in Ukraine ends with a victory for Ukraine. But she warned that there are prisoners in Russia who might not make it until then because they are being held in such "horrible conditions."