Vladimir Kara-Murza, 42, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence in Omsk, a city more than 2,000 kilometers from Moscow.
He was arrested in the spring of 2022 when he returned to Russia from the U.S. and Europe, where he had condemned Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal.
Shortly after his return, authorities filed a series of criminal cases against him, including charges of high treason, spreading “false information” about the Russian army, and participating in activities of organizations deemed “undesirable.”
The 25-year sentence that he is serving is related to all of these charges.
His wife, Evgenia Kara-Murza, posted on the social media platform X on Tuesday that his fate had been unknown since the end of last week, when he was taken to the hospital.
“We don’t know anything about Vladimir since July 2nd, when he was last seen by the lawyer. On July 4th we were told that Vladimir had been transferred to the prison hospital on the same day,” she wrote.
However, his lawyer, Vadim Prokhorov, said on Wednesday that one of Kara-Murza’s lawyers had managed to see him and confirmed that he was taken to the hospital for tests. The lawyers are currently trying to determine why the tests were ordered.
“The health of Vladimir Kara-Murza is currently quite stable. However, he suffers from a severe chronic disease—polyneuropathy, which is incompatible with serving a sentence in a penal colony,” Prokhorov wrote on Facebook.
Kara-Murza’s supporters have stressed since his conviction that the journalist, who survived two poisoning attempts in 2015 and 2017 and suffers from polyneuropathy, may not survive prison. Concerns for his safety have intensified following the sudden death of opposition figure Alexei Navalny in prison in February.
Kara-Murza was an associate of Boris Nemtsov, a vocal critic of Putin and former Russian deputy prime minister, who was assassinated in 2015.
