Kiev, Ukraine – Vladimir Kara Muruza did not survive two suspicious addictions in 2015 and 2017, which he claimed to have been coordinated by the Kremlin.
The bearded 43-year-old may not be as open-minded as opposition leader Alexy Navalny, who nearly died from a similar nerve agent poisoning in 2020.
But Cambridge-educated historian Kara Muruza has been committed to persuading the Western government to slap personal sanctions against dozens of Russian officials.
In 2023, a Moscow court sentenced him to 25 years in prison for “treason,” and while he was behind the bar, he won the Pulitzer Prize for columns in the Washington Post.
Released last year as part of a prisoner swap, Kara Murza settled in Germany and continued advocacy for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s government and Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
But last week, Kara Muruza’s remarks about the ethnic identity and concerns about the blood of Russian military personnel rattled many on both sides of Europe’s hottest armed conflict.
“In the end [ethnic] Kara Murza spoke to the French Senate on Thursday, explaining why the Russian Ministry of Defense would join ethnic minorities.
“because [ethnic Russians and Ukrainians] It’s the same, but we are similar. We have almost the same language, the same religion, a common history of hundreds and hundreds of years,” said Kara Muruza.
The Russians and Ukrainians are Slavs of states that date back to Kivan Rus, the largest nation in Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages, torn by Mongols, Poles and Lithuanians.
“But it is said that killing Ukrainians is easy for people who belong to another culture,” added Kara Muruza.
His remarks defended observers and indigenous rights advocates for flinch and smoke.
The former Russian diplomat said, “Measurement of the degree of cruelty due to ethnicity is a dead end.”
The Kremlin specifically “employs minorities and recruits people from the poorest regions, and they, in principle, are ethnic autonomous people,” Boris Bondarev, who quit his foreign ministry job in protest of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, told Al Jazeera.
“In the fourth year of the war in a multi-ethnic society, only the boring man could say,” said Dmitry Beretskov, an indigenous activist from the Itermen state of Kamchatka’s Russian-Pacific Peninsula.
“The liberal opposition in Russia were primarily middle-class urban figures, and quickly drowned when he stepped on the thin ice of ethnic minority issues,” he added.
The ethnic Russians account for more than two-thirds of Russia’s population of 143 million. The rest are minorities. From millions of Ukrainians and Tatars to small indigenous groups in the Siberian and Arctic Circle, primarily nominal but with local autonomy.
Even in areas rich in hydrocarbons, rare earths, or diamonds, minorities live in rural, often intimate areas, coexisting and mingling with ethnic Russians.
They all rely more on Kremlin-funded television networks than city residents, often seeing sign-up bonuses and salaries of military personnel fighting in Ukraine as tickets from the miserable poverty where their families live.
Recruiters receive up to $50,000 when they sign up, earning thousands of dollars a month. This is a property for anyone in these regions, regardless of their ethnic background.
“This is huge money for them and they’ll never get it in their lives, whether they’re Buryat or Russian,” Bondarev said.
In response to a squall of criticism, Kara Muruza wrote on Facebook Monday that the charges were merely “lie, manipulation, slander.”
To Berezhkov, this comment further contaminated the image of Kara-Murza.
“In the past, [Kara-Murza’s words] It could be considered a mistake, but now they are in his position,” he said.
To another minority rights advocate, Kara Muruza’s Diatrib sounded like a “future voter signal” in postwar Russia, hoping that Kremlin critics would return.
Oyuma Dongak, who fled from Taiba, a Turkish-speaking province that crosses China’s border, believes Kara Muruza and other exiled Russian opposition leaders are “competing” with Putin.
“It’s not him, it’s us who protect it. [ethnic] Russian,” she told Al Jazeera.
In 2024, Kara-Murza said the 2022 invasion was “unfair and counterproductive” and imposed Western sanctions on Moscow after it hurt the Russians. He hoped the West would lift wider sanctions and instead target individual officials.
A Ukrainian observer said Kara Muruza did not want Russians who could potentially vote for the currently existing opposition leaders to feel collective guilt over the atrocities committed in Ukraine.
“People don’t feel guilty. If you club them in your head with moral condemns every day, people won’t acknowledge their guilt, but they’ll hate the people who club them,” Kyiv-based analyst Vyacheslav Likhachyov told Al Jazeera.
“That’s why the story of the atrocities of Chechnya executioners and Bayat rapists is popular and popular,” he said.
The fighter jet deployed by Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of the Chechnya Prokremlin, was called the “Tiktok army” in a step-by-step video “raids” over Ukrainian bases.
Their actual role in the war is largely reduced to protecting the occupied territories, and torture the Russian soldiers who refuse to fight.
However, burialists, Buddhist indigenous peoples in an unpopulated and poor area near Mongolia, became infamous in Ukraine in 2022.
Human rights groups and Ukrainian officials have identified personal details of several Bellat soldiers who tortured, raped and murdered civilians in Bucha and other towns in northern Kiev.
However, Ukrainians were often labelled all “buries,” as ethnic burialists are difficult to distinguish from other minority military personnel with apparent Asian characteristics, community activists said.
“All Caucasian natives are considered Chechnya, and all Asians are considered burialists,” Alexandra Garmazapova, who helps Beryat men flee mobilising and fleeing abroad, told Al Jazeera.
However, the vast majority of the soldiers who allegedly suspected war crimes in Bucha were reportedly Russians.
Garmazhapova survived as Ukrainian forces began shelling Russian status and his prisoners fled into the basement.
“Slabs, Slabs, they were all Slabs,” said Victor, a resident of Bucha, who was fueled by Russian soldiers, who bet on Al Jazeera in 2022 after he ran after his ordeal.
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