“The Future Belongs to Democracy” Says Freed Russian Opposition Leader

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, Russian politics and the price for those who dare challenge Putin’s regime. In April 2022, soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the opposition leader, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was one of many dissidents arrested for speaking out. By chance, he was on his way to an interview with our colleague, Walter Isaacson. Instead, he found himself behind bars. This summer, he was released after more than two years in a prisoner swap that included the American journalist, Evan Gershkovich, of The Wall Street Journal. Kara-Murza sat down with Walter to discuss his personal story and the very unique excuse he had for missing out on their last interview.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Christiane. And, Vladimir Kara-Murza, welcome back to the show.

VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA, RUSSIAN OPPOSITION POLITICIAN AND 2024 PULITZER PRIZE WINNER FOR COMMENTARY: Hello, Walter. It’s really good to be on your program. And I’m sorry I missed our appointment last time, in April of 2022, but I’m glad I was finally able to make it.

ISAACSON: And I just said, welcome back to the show. But that April in 2022, I was sitting here waiting for you and you were about to come on the show and then you didn’t. Tell me what happened.

KARA-MURZA: Well, I was coming home to my Moscow apartment from a meeting. I was driving. So, I was conscious of the interview we had scheduled with you. I was supposed to do this from my apartment in Moscow, the same way by video link. And as I was approaching my house, and I saw the bridge over the Moscow River, I noticed a surveillance car following me in my rear-view mirror. Didn’t pay much attention, to be honest with you, because if you’re a Russian politician in an era of Vladimir Putin, surveillance is not something that gets you surprised, we get it all the time. So, OK, one more surveillance car. But then as I was approaching my house, my apartment block I noticed a silver minivan with darkened windows standing in that park right next to the entrance. But again, didn’t pay much attention because I live in downtown Moscow. It’s always busy, always cars around. But as I stopped to press the button to open the gate to go and park in my courtyard, I saw, again, the rear-view mirror of my car, five or six police officers, you know, black balaclava masks on their faces, black uniforms, who got out of that minivan and started running behind my car. So, of course, at that moment, I understood everything. So, I just had time to park my car and text my lawyer that I’ve been arrested. At that moment, the commanding police officer over my door told me to come and follow them. I saw the phone ringing from — I guess, from your producers while they were driving me away to the police station, but they seized my phone. So, I was no longer allowed to use them. So, I felt very bad because it was an impolite way to just not turn up to our scheduled interview, but I’ve had some circumstances beyond my control. So, I hope you’ll forgive me for that.

ISAACSON: The best excuse we’ve ever heard. But you had been, I think, poisoned twice or allegedly they tried to poison you twice. And yet, you still went back to Moscow to fight against or protest against the invasion of Ukraine. Why did you feel the need to go back?

KARA-MURZA: Well, how could I not stay at my home? I’m a Russian politician. Russia is my country. A politician has to be with their fellow citizens in their own country. To me, it cannot be any other way. What moral right would I have to call for my fellow Russian citizens to stand up and resist Putin’s dictatorship if I didn’t do it myself? So, there was never any question in my mind as to leaving Russia. To me, this is a responsibility that transcends any considerations of personal safety and personal comfort. If I’m calling on my fellow Russian citizens to stand up to this dictatorship, I have to be willing to do it myself.

ISAACSON: In addition to protesting the Russian invasion, one of the things that got you in trouble with the Putin regime in Russia is that you, along with Bill Browder, our friend, and I think the late Senator John McCain, helped push the Magnitsky Act, both in the United States and then some of the sanctions around the world. Explain what that was and what it’s done.

KARA-MURZA: The Magnitsky Act was an absolutely brilliant revolutionary piece of legislation that was first introduced in the United States Congress back in 2010 by Senator Ben Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, the current chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the late Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who’s one of the most powerful, the most prominent voices on Capitol Hill in support of democracy and human rights. And this law put forward a very simple premise. But those people, those individuals who are known based on corroborated evidence, needless to say, to have been personally implicated in human rights violations or corruption will no longer be able to get American visas on American assets or use the financial or banking system of the United States. It sounds very simple today, but at the time it was a revolutionary concept, because before, in previous eras, sanctions were imposed generally, on everybody, on whole countries. The notion of the Magnitsky Act was that responsibility should be individual, it should be assigned to those people who actually are responsible. And I had the honor and the privilege to work alongside Boris Nemtsov, my friend, my mentor, the leader of the Russian democratic opposition, in advocating for this law, convincing the American Congress to pass this law. I should add, there was significant resistance from the then-U.S. administration, it was the Obama administration at the time, they, as you remember, had a reset policy with Vladimir Putin. So, they had nothing — they wanted to have nothing to do with this legislation. But at the end of the day, both houses of the U.S. Congress, on a bipartisan basis, passed this legislation overwhelmingly. And I continue this work in many other countries, and I’m proud to say that today there are Magnitsky laws on the books in 35 different countries and jurisdictions around the world, that includes the United States, includes Canada, Great Britain, Australia, the whole of the European Union, and many other places. And this is a very simple statement from democratic countries that pride themselves on adhering to such notions as rule of law, democracy, and respect for human rights, that people who are violating those notions will no longer be welcomed. But of course, you can guess what the attitude of the Kremlin regime to that was, because with this legislation, they lost their coveted access to the democratic west. And so, these two poisonings that were organized against me by the FSB, in 2015 and 2017, that was a response to the Magnitsky Act. And then, again, when I was tried in the Moscow city court for my public opposition to the Putin regime and to the war in Ukraine, the judge who handed me my 25-year prison sentence for so-called high treason was the very same judge, his name is Sergey Podoprigorov, who jailed Sergei Magnitsky back in 2008. He was the same judge who was one of the first people to be sanctioned by the United States Magnitsky Act, you know, for which I had actively advocated. And so, the Kremlin deliberately, very demonstratively, appointed that same judge to try me and to convict me and to hand me my 25-year prison sentence just to make it absolutely clear and obvious. But you know what, Walter? To me, this is very clear proof of just how effective the Magnitsky Act is and just how fearful these crooks and murderers and human rights abusers around Putin are of this legislation. So, I just want to take this opportunity once again to thank those leaders in the American Congress, on both sides of the aisle, who are instrumental in getting that legislation passed.

ISAACSON: You’ve said that the Magnitsky Act, which sanctions individuals, has been very effective. And we’ve also put what we said would be key crippling sanctions on the Russian economy as a whole. And yet, I’m not sure that sanctions have done all that much. The Russian economy seems to be OK. Explain to me, why have sanctions not worked better overall?

KARA-MURZA: I completely agree with you. These sanctions mechanisms imposed on Putin’s Russia since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine are not working effectively, and they’re not working effectively for two reasons. I’ve now been out of prison for three months after the prison exchange on August 1st, and during all this time I’ve been catching up on, you know, two and a half years’ worth of information vacuum and sort of reading and learning and sort of listening to many new things. And one of the main areas I’ve been sort of educating myself in was the way that these all these new sanctions have been imposed and the way they’re operating since February of 2022, since Putin invasion of Ukraine. And there are two major problems with the way these sanctions are operating. The first problem is the fact — that is the fact of the matter is that there are many glaring holes in these sanctions mechanisms that allow the Putin regime frankly to go around them. It is a shocking fact that to this day, almost three years into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine up to 30 percent of the military equipment and military technologies used by the Russian army against Ukraine still come from western allied sources. How is that possible? The fact is that the Russian missile that hit a children’s hospital in Kyiv in July, on the 8th of July of this year, contained several western produced microchips, including U.S. produced microchips. The Russian missile —

ISAACSON: Well, wait. Explain to me why that is possible. That’s against the law.

KARA-MURZA: And to me, it speaks to the fact that there’s not enough political will to enforce export controls, to enforce all these compliance rules. They all exist. They’re all out there. But we see that there are still glaring holes in these sanctions mechanisms, by the way, not only with regard to sort of these general measures, but also with regard to the personal targeted sanctions that we’ve just been talking about in relation to the Magnitsky Act. Up until recently, the wife of Putin’s deputy minister of defense, while the war in Ukraine is going on, was still living in her apartment in Paris. How is that possible? So, we see that there are still too many holes that need to be addressed in the sanctions mechanism, that they’re not effective enough in really pushing against Putin’s war machine, against Putin wars — Putin’s war economy, because to me, the goal of these sanctions should be to make it more difficult and ideally impossible for the Putin regime to continue conducting this war.

ISAACSON: You have the rest of the world, which we haven’t been able to line up against Russia, meaning India, China, Iran. Is there some other mechanism that would be more effective than sanctions?

KARA-MURZA: It is very important to continue supporting Ukraine. Vladimir Putin and Putin regime cannot be allowed to emerge victorious from this unjust criminal war of aggression that Putin has initiated. They cannot be allowed to emerge victorious. This war has to end in a way that is acceptable to Ukraine, that is not humiliating for Ukraine, in which Ukraine emerges with guarantees of its status as a sovereign and independent democratic country. That’s number one, that’s very important. I understand the fatigue. This war has been going on for almost three years. I understand the fatigue around the world. But those people who are advocating for some sort of a short-term deal with Putin over Ukraine, they’re not advocating for peace. This will just push the problem down the line. And in fact, we know from history that appeasement only makes an aggressor more aggressive and makes him want to grab more. So, continuing to support Ukraine and resisting these calls to cut a deal with Putin is very important. Number two, it is very important for the west, for the democratic nations of the world to continue speaking, messaging, communicating of Russian society. Because, again, not all Russians support Putin and the war, there are many who don’t, and it’s very important that those pro-democracy and anti-war Russians are seen by the western world as allies in a struggle. This is not a war, unlike what Putin’s propaganda is trying to present. This is not a war between the collective west, as they say, and the Russian people. Not at all. This is a war between civilization and barbarism. This is a war between democracy and tyranny. And millions of Russians are allies of the free world in this war. And this should be understood, and this should be practically implemented by the western world. There have to be ways to message, for the free world to message and communicate with the people of Russia, to send a message that this war is not with the Russian people, this was with the Putin regime. The core for the west is with the Putin dictatorship. And that there will be a place for a different changed Democratic Russia in International Community who wants the Putin regime to fall.

ISAACSON: Well, wait. Let me ask you about that because you — I’m sure you have contacts with people in Russia still. To what extent is there an anti-war sentiment in Russia? Is it big enough that it’s going to have any impact?

KARA-MURZA: There are many people in Russia who oppose this regime and this war. I’m not going to be able to give you percentage numbers because in a repressive totalitarian dictatorship, it is meaningless to talk about public opinion. It is impossible to judge the true state of public opinion in a country that imprisons you for expressing it. What’s much more important to me is that sometimes, from time to time, we get what I would call glimpses of the reality, glimpses into how many Russians actually feel about Putin and about this war. And one of these glimpses came in February of this year, when, you know, amid the stage circus of our so-called presidential election, when it was Putin and a couple of handpicked clowns alongside him on the ballot there was one candidate, a lawyer, former member of parliament by the name of Boris Nadezhdin, who announced that he was running for president of Russia on an anti-war platform. And you wouldn’t believe the public response. It was unimaginable. Suddenly, all over Russia, in large cities and small towns, there were these long lines, hours long lines that were formed of people who wanted to sign the nominating petitions, because you have to collect a certain number of signatures to get on the ballot. People who wanted to sign the nominating petitions to get this anti-war candidate on the ballot. And all my letters in February in prison, most of my letters, were about those lines and how important it was for people to realize that they’re not alone, because the Putin propaganda tries to create this image that the Russian society is a monolith, you know, that all Russians support Putin, all Russians support the war. And of course, it is a lie. And people sort of know it is a lie. But it’s very important to see it visibly. Because these long, long, long lines of people, you know, you can read election results, you can fake opinion poll figures, but you cannot rig these photos of these long, long lines of people. And I remember — and needless to say, this candidate was not allowed in the ballot because opposition candidates in today’s Russia never are. But it was so important for people to see that they’re not alone. This was the main point of this. I’ll never forget the letter I received from one young woman in the Black Sea town of Novorossiysk. This is in the south of Russia. And she described how she waited in a line of likeminded people, you know, mostly young people, for two or three hours to sign that nominating petition for the anti-war candidate. And at the end of that letter, she wrote, I never realized how many of us there are. I want the free world, I want the west to see and hear that Russia, the other side of Russia, not the Russia of murderers and war criminals who are sitting in the Kremlin, but the Russia of good, decent, kind hearted people who oppose this dictatorship, who oppose this war, because we are Russians too, and there are many of us.

ISAACSON: We often think that authoritarians come to power, you know, through force. But a lot of times, including to some extent in Russia, it happens through democracy. And we’re kind of seeing around the world perhaps some yearning for stronger leaders, for nationalism. We look at the support for Orban in Hungary and other places. What do you make of what’s happening to democracy?

KARA-MURZA: Well, there are always these waves, right? Many political scientists, many historians have spoken of these waves of this pendulum that sort of swings back and forth. But I think it’s important to look at the big picture, and the big picture will tell us beyond any doubt at all that whatever the short-term challenges or problems or even threats that the world as a whole may encounter, there is no doubt that the general direction is always towards more democracies, always towards more freedom. If we look at the map of Europe, let’s say 35 years ago, that’s nothing by historical standards. That’s like yesterday morning. We will see that half of the European continent was living under various forms of dictatorial or authoritarian regimes. If you look at the map of Europe today, you will only see two dictatorships left, that’s Putin’s Russia and Lukashenko’s Belarus. And I have no doubt that, you know, the day will come in the very foreseeable future when Europe is dictatorship free. And it is important to talk about these challenges. I’m not trying to say this is not serious. It is. And it’s very worrying to see these authoritarian trends in democratic countries. I mean, just a couple of months ago, there were a series of regional elections in Germany, for example, in the eastern part, the former GDR that were won — or at least were significant success was achieved by far-right parties. No one year majority, of course, but still significant success. And yes, these are worrying trends that people should address and should think about. But I think it’s important not to lose sight of the big picture. The future belongs to freedom. The future belongs to democracy. It does not belong to these archaic repressive regimes of the type that we have in Russia to the end of Vladimir Putin. And I have no doubt that in the very foreseeable future, we will see the demise and the end of all of them.

ISAACSON: Vladimir Kara-Murza, thank you for joining us.

KARA-MURZA: Thank you for having me.