Bill Browder on his friendship with Vladimir Kara-Murza, why he returned to Russia, and their last dinner together
Ukraine last year, everyone was shocked and scared. But for me, it was deeply personal. I’ve known Putin’s murderous intent for the last two decades, and I knew how terrible this was going to be.
Putin was so upset by this new law that he made repealing it his single largest foreign policy priority. Putin is a man who has committed many human rights abuses in order to steal money. He and his cronies have accumulated enormous fortunes, and they keep those fortunes in the West. For them, but especially for Putin, the Magnitsky Act is an existential threat.
Toward the end, he said, “It is painful beyond words to see the destruction, the cluster bombing of schools and hospitals and maternity wards that the Putin regime is doing. [To witness] the war crimes, the crimes against humanity.” “Bill,” he said, “I’m a Russian politician. All Russians should stand up to Putin. But how can I ask others to do that if I’m too afraid to return to my own country? I must be there.”
But instead, Evgenia just looked at me. She’d known what she was signing up for when she married Vladimir, and she supported his decision. That day, Vladimir and Evgenia took the Eurostar to Paris where Vladimir was giving a speech on political prisoners at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. They rented a tiny apartment in the 16th arrondissement for a few nights. On the morning of April 5, Vladimir got up early and packed while Evgenia slept. He woke her to give her a kiss and then left. A couple hours later, she got up. She was alone.
On the other side of the world, Vladimir was doing the same thing with the same media outlets from his apartment in Moscow. Clearly worried, the CNN correspondent asked, “Aren’t you concerned that you will be targeted again, and potentially this time it will take, you will die?” I immediately called Evgenia. She tried to put on a brave face. Even though we both knew how serious this was, she said that at the moment it was only an administrative offense. Before the war, the Russian authorities routinely grabbed protesters and members of the opposition, held them for 15 days, and then let them go. It had happened to Vladimir. Hopefully, this would be the case again.I headed to DC on April 14, where the book launch had morphed into an event about Vladimir.
Between meetings, Evgenia told me that the detention center where Vladimir was being held was headed by a man named Dmitry Komnov. This was the same official who headed the detention center where Sergei Magnitsky had been tortured and denied medical care before his murder. She told me that the cell was three meters by one-and-a-half meters, and that the bed was folded into the wall from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. The only place for him to sit was a short backless stool. The room crawled with finger-sized cockroaches.Vladimir suffered from severe nerve damage from his two poisonings. We still don’t know what he’d been poisoned with, but I have to assume it was the banned chemical nerve agent, Novichok.
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