Jailed politician Vladimir Kara-Murza blames Putin for Navalny’s death

Russian politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, currently serving a 25-year prison sentence for his outspoken criticism of the war in Ukraine, assigned personal blame for Alexey Navalny’s death to Vladimir Putin in a series of posts on X on Tuesday.

In the posts, Kara-Murza blamed Putin for the long-running persecution campaign against Navalny, saying he personally ordered Navalny be poisoned in 2020, condemned to years in a penal colony and subjected to “torturous conditions”.

Putin, Kara-Murza wrote, had “brought death for all 25 years of his rule”, citing a series of examples: the 1999 Russian apartment bombings, the Second Chechen War, the 2002 Moscow theatre hostage crisis, the 2004 Beslan school siege, and the wars in Georgia, Syria and Ukraine.

“The best are dying — the bravest, most sincere and most caring,” Kara-Murza said, while the “vengeful, cowardly, greedy old man” Putin kept “clinging onto power with a deathly grip, destroying anyone he sees as a threat to his rule”.