Anti-Putin Russian Poisoned For Second Time

[MI2AZ]

A prominent Russian opposition activist who almost died from an apparent poisoning two years ago was in stable but critical condition Friday after suddenly falling ill during a trip to Moscow.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, a U.S. green card holder with dual British-Russian citizenship, was in Russia promoting a documentary film about Boris Nemtsov, his close friend and Russian opposition leader who was shot and killed only a few hundred yards from the Kremlin in 2015.

Kara-Murza, a journalist who lives in Virginia with his wife, Evgenia, is chairman of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom and coordinator of the Open Russia Foundation, which promotes civil society and democracy. He has also testified before Congress on political repression in Russia.

Kara-Murza's condition is similar to 2015 when he almost died from sudden kidney failure in a suspected poisoning in Moscow.

His lawyer, Vadim Prokhorov, said in a posting on Facebook that his condition stabilized but that Kara-Murza remained in critical condition with kidney failure after falling ill Thursday.

"He is already on life support and in a medicated coma. It's the same clinical picture (as last time)," his wife told the BBC. "The reason is unclear like last time. He's (recently) been active and healthy."

Evgenia Kara-Murza said her husband, who had been staying at his in-law's home, suffered the same symptoms as in May 2015. In that incident, he was treated in Moscow but eventually transferred abroad following the intervention of British and U.S. diplomats.

On Wednesday, Kara-Murza posted a Facebook tribute to Nemtsov along with a photo of roses at the site on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge near the Kremlin where he was shot and killed in February 2015 by gunmen in a passing car. Kara-Murza's suspected poisoning in 2015 also occurred during a visit to Moscow to honor his slain friend.

After his recovery two years ago, Kara-Murza said the ordeal began with the sudden failure of his kidneys followed by other vital organs in what he called a politically motivated attack.

"Frankly there is no other possible reason," he told CNN. "I don't have any money dealings. I don't have any personal enemies. I didn't steal anybody's wife."

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who spoke out this week against dissidents and journalists targeted for murder in Russia, said it appears Kara-Murza was again singled out for his political and opposition activity.

"(Russian President) Vladimir Putin does not deserve any benefit of the doubt here, given how commonplace political assassinations and poisonings have become under his regime," said Rubio, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations committee.

He called on the Trump administration and new U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to "make Kara-Murza's cause America's cause," to question Russian authorities on the incident and to "ultimately hold Putin accountable if he was targeted by the regime.”

Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., the ranking member of the foreign relations committee, praised Kara-Murza for his activism and human rights work and said his mysterious illness "appears to be part of an alarming trend where Russian political opposition are targeted for their work."

 

[9andaWiggle]

Poison? Really? Surely there are more effective, certain ways to remove one who is inconvenient. See also: cement shoes, sleeping with fish, etc.

 

[Greg T.]

Probably just a wake up call to others

 

[MI2AZ]

MOSCOW — From a certain perspective, certainly the Kremlin’s, Vladimir Kara-Murza’s behavior in Washington could be seen as treasonous, a brazen betrayal of his homeland.

In a series of public meetings on Capitol Hill, Mr. Kara-Murza, a leader in the Russian opposition, urged American lawmakers to expand economic sanctions against the Russian government under a law known as the Magnitsky Act. That would hasten political change in Russia, he argued.

Back in Moscow a month later, in May 2015, the changes Mr. Kara-Murza detected were going on in his own body. Midway through a meeting with fellow dissidents, beads of sweat inexplicably dotted his forehead. His stomach churned.

“It all went so fast,” he recalled. “In the space of about 20 minutes, I went from feeling completely normal to having a rapid heart rate, really high blood pressure, to sweating and vomiting all over the place, and then I lost consciousness.” He had ingested a poison, doctors told him after he emerged from a weeklong coma, though they could find no identifiable trace of it.

While Mr. Kara-Murza survived, few others in his position have proved as lucky. He said he was certain he had been the target of a security service poisoning. Used extensively in the Soviet era, political murders are again playing a prominent role in the Kremlin’s foreign policy, the most brutal instrument in an expanding repertoire of intimidation tactics intended to silence or otherwise intimidate critics at home and abroad.

Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, has made no secret of his ambition to restore his country to what he sees as its rightful place among the world’s leading nations. He has invested considerable money and energy into building an image of a strong and morally superior Russia, in sharp contrast with what he portrays as weak, decadent and disorderly Western democracies.

Muckraking journalists, rights advocates, opposition politicians, government whistle-blowers and other Russians who threaten that image are treated harshly — imprisoned on trumped-up charges, smeared in the news media and, with increasing frequency, killed.

Political murders, particularly those accomplished with poisons, are nothing new in Russia, going back five centuries. Nor are they particularly subtle. While typically not traceable to any individuals and plausibly denied by government officials, poisonings leave little doubt of the state’s involvement — which may be precisely the point.

“Outside of popular culture, there are no highly skilled hit men for hire,” Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University and an authority on the Russian security services, said in an interview. “If it’s a skilled job, that means it’s a state asset.”

Other countries, notably Israel and the United States, pursue targeted killings, but in a strict counterterrorism context. No other major power employs murder as systematically and ruthlessly as Russia does against those seen as betraying its interests abroad. Killings outside Russia were even given legal sanction by the nation’s Parliament in 2006.

Applied most notoriously in the case of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a Putin opponent who died of polonium-210 poisoning in London in 2006, murders and deaths under mysterious circumstances are now seen as such a menace that Kremlin critics now often flee the country and keep their whereabouts secret.

Russia has never acknowledged using the authority under the 2006 law and has specifically denied any government ties to high-profile cases, including the Litvinenko murder.

Among those fleeing Russia recently is Grigory Rodchenkov, a whistle-blower in Russia’s sports doping scandal.

This is not without reason. In the case over state-sponsored doping, two other officials with knowledge of the scheme died unexpectedly as the outlines of the scandal began to emerge. Just this month, another whistle-blower, Yulia Stepanova, a runner in hiding with her husband in the United States, was forced to move amid fears that hackers had found her location. “If something happens to us,” she said, “then you should know that it is not an accident.”

“The government is using the special services to liquidate its enemies,” Gennadi V. Gudkov, a former member of Parliament and onetime lieutenant colonel in the K.G.B., said in an interview. “It was not just Litvinenko, but many others we don’t know about, classified as accidents or maybe semi-accidents.”

Most recently, a coroner ruled that blunt-force trauma caused the death of a Kremlin insider, Mikhail Y. Lesin, 57, in a Washington hotel room last year, not the heart attack his colleagues first said. In July, the Russian Interfax news agency reported that Aleksandr Poteyev, 64, an intelligence officer accused of defecting and betraying a ring of Russian spies living undercover in American suburbs, had died in the United States.

On 2 March 2007, Paul Joyal, a former director of security for the U.S. Senate intelligence committee, who the previous weekend alleged on national television that the Kremlin was involved in the poisoning of Litvinenko, was shot near his Maryland home. An FBI spokesman said the agency was "assisting" the police investigation into the shooting.

.

 

[Greg T.]

The Clintons should relate to this