By Kontur and AFP | 2024-09-11

PARIS -- A leading opponent of Vladimir Putin, freed in a prisoner swap last month, urged the West against allowing the Russian leader any "face-saving" way out of the war against Ukraine.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, who had been serving a 25-year sentence in a Siberian penal colony on treason and other charges after denouncing the invasion of Ukraine, was one of 16 Russian dissidents and foreign nationals freed on August 1 in the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War.

In an interview with AFP in Paris on September 9, Kara-Murza, 43, predicted he would be able to return to his homeland.

Arriving in France after visits to countries including Germany, he insisted the "Putin regime must be defeated."

"It is very important that Vladimir Putin is not allowed to win the war against Ukraine," said Kara-Murza, who discussed Russia and other matters with French President Emmanuel Macron during his visit.

The West must not give Putin a "face-saving exit from this war in Ukraine," he said.

"If, God forbid, the Putin regime is allowed to present the outcome of this war as a victory and survive in power, all this means is that a year or 18 months from now we will be talking about another war, conflict or another catastrophe."

'Special solidarity'

Kara-Murza, a dual Russian and UK national who studied at Cambridge, said he would be "honored" to go to Ukraine for talks with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, adding that he advocated building bridges between Russia's pro-democracy movement and Ukraine.

"We will have to find ways of living together and of overcoming this horrendous tragedy that the Putin regime has unleashed," he said.

"It is not going to be an easy process' it's not going to be a quick process, but we know that it's possible."

He felt a "special kind of solidarity" with Ukrainian officers who were held in his Siberian prison camp, even though they were not allowed to speak to each other.

Kara-Murza said he had been "absolutely certain" he would die in the penal colony in Omsk province -- until one morning he was suddenly put on a plane to Moscow and then with other prisoners was swapped in the Turkish capital Ankara.

"Nobody has ever asked our consent," he said. "They herded us on a plane like cattle and threw us out of Russia."

Macron applauded the Kremlin opponent for his "courage" during their meeting, while reiterating "France's support for all defenders of human rights and freedom of expression," the presidency said in a statement.

'The future is coming'

Kara-Murza sees as his mentor the politician Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in Moscow in 2015.

He brushed off fears for his own safety outside Russia.

"Security is not a word that comes into the vocabulary of somebody who is in opposition to Putin's regime in Russia," he said. He survived two poisonings even before his arrest in 2022.

"Whether Putin likes it or not, the future is coming," he said.

Kara-Murza recalled his own shock at the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison camp in February.

"I heard the news on the radio," he said, adding that at first he could not believe it.

"After months and months in solitary confinement, your mind starts playing tricks on you," he said. "I thought that maybe I'd made all of this up."

He is confident that Navalny was killed on orders from Putin.

"Any Western leader who shakes hands with Vladimir Putin is shaking hands with a murderer."

His wife, Yevgenia, who tirelessly campaigned for his release, said "rage" against the "crimes" committed by the Kremlin in Ukraine and Russia had sustained her.

"The rage that I've been feeling for all these years... outweighs any fears that I can experience," she said, pledging to continue fighting for the release of other political prisoners.

Vladimir called himself "the luckiest man in the world."

"I would not be sitting here speaking with you today if it wasn't for Yevgenia," he said.