Russian opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza given 15 days in jail

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Wife of Russian opposition leader: 'My husband is being persecuted for his activism'

Fox News' Amy Kellogg speaks with Evgenia Kara-Murza about her husband's recent arrest.

You can't call a war a war.  And you can't call a case what it really is.  

Russian opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza was just given 15 days in jail for trying to evade capture by police. That was not what observers were expecting, but his wife shares her thoughts on it with Fox News.

The court says Kara-Murza sped up his walking pace and even changed direction when he spotted police coming toward him on Monday. Evgenia Kara-Murza calls the story absurd. She says police were lying in wait for her husband when he pulled up to his house. They surrounded his car and ordered him out. 

Russian journalist and activist Vladimir Kara-Murza attends a conference of Russia's leading rights group Memorial in Moscow on October 27, 2021. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images)

"There is nothing to the charge itself. It has nothing to do with reality," Evgenia says. "I'm absolutely sure that my husband is being persecuted for his political activity, for his opposition activity, for advocating for personal sanctions against the murderers and thieves in the Putin regime, for calling their bloody war a war." 

Mrs. Kara-Murza believes the courts are using the disobeying police charge as a pretext for keeping her husband in jail until they come up with a better way to silence him. 

"Under this article (disobeying police) a person can get a jail sentence straight away, unlike the new law on dissemination of fake news," she explains. There "you get fined first. You can be sent to prison for fifteen years. That is true. But it has to be the second or the third offense."

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She puts on a brave face, because she has been in the trenches with Vladimir for two decades as he built a career on calling out the Putin regime on abuse of power.

He was close with Boris Nemtsov, the opposition figure gunned down on a bridge behind the Kremlin in 2015 and has advocated for justice in the unresolved case. He works with former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky who was packed off to prison for years and now funds and fronts opposition work from his place of exile.

Russian journalist and activist Vladimir Kara-Murza (L) and Russian activist Sergei Davidis attend a conference of Russia's leading rights group Memorial in Moscow on October 27, 2021. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images)

There have been two attempts to poison Kara-Murza. The first time doctors in Moscow tried to explain his multiple organ failure as perhaps a response to excessive drinking, which his wife also calls absurd as her husband, then in his early thirties, was in good health.  

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The second time around, she claims the doctor admitted the grave illness looked like poisoning though no substance has ever been identified nor has Russia officially admitted Kara-Murza was poisoned. Evgenia believes they used a similar tactic to what they did with another opposition figure Alexei Navalny, administering poison before a long-haul flight in the hopes that help wouldn't get there in time. 

Only in Kara-Murza's case, the flight he'd been about to board was transatlantic, so it would have been harder to make an emergency landing for a sick patient. But the poison, his wife says, mercifully kicked in pre-maturely. He did not board the plane, and he did manage to get treated in Moscow.

Russian journalist and activist Vladimir Kara-Murza attends a conference of Russia's leading rights group Memorial in Moscow on October 27, 2021. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images)

And Kara-Murza keeps going back to Moscow, which a lot of people would not do. While the family (they have three children) lives in the Washington area, Vladimir feels he needs to be with his people to keep up pressure on Putin.

"He believes that as a Russian politician, he needs to be where his people are fighting against a murderous, bloody regime. And he believes that he wouldn't have the right to call on these people to continue their fight if he himself hid somewhere? It's just it's not the way he's made, he's going to be there on the front lines, and he's always been. Despite enormous personal risks," she says.

She had a chance to speak to her husband last night after his arrest – he got to make one call from detention.

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Evgenia Kara-Murza says he asked her to tell his mother and grandmother that he was fine, and he would be fine.  But she doesn't know where he will be taken next.

I asked what she tells the children, the eldest of whom is sixteen. "That their father has been arrested...for doing the right thing. For standing up to the evil that Mr. Putin represents. For standing up against the war, for speaking out," she pauses, tears welling in her eyes. "And that they should be proud of him."