Kyiv, Ukraine – Vladimir Kara-Murza barely survived two suspected poisonings in 2015 and 2017 that he claimed had been orchestrated by the Kremlin.
The bearded, balding 43-year-old might not be as outspoken as opposition chief Alexey Navalny, who almost died of comparable nerve agent poisoning in 2020.
However Kara-Murza, a Cambridge-educated historian, has been instrumental in convincing Western governments to slap private sanctions on dozens of Russian officers.
In 2023, a Moscow court docket sentenced him to 25 years in jail for “treason” and whereas behind bars, he gained a Pulitzer Prize for his columns for The Washington Submit.
Launched final yr as a part of a prisoner swap, Kara-Murza settled in Germany and continued his advocacy work in opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authorities and Moscow’s warfare in Ukraine.
However final week, Kara-Murza’s remarks in regards to the ethnic identification and alleged bloodthirst of Russian servicemen rattled many on each side of Europe’s hottest armed battle.
“Because it seems, [ethnic] Russians discover it psychologically tough to kill Ukrainians,” Kara-Murza instructed the French Senate on Thursday whereas explaining why Russia’s Ministry of Defence enlists ethnic minorities.
“As a result of [ethnic Russians and Ukrainians] are the identical, we’re related folks, we have now an virtually related language, identical faith, a whole bunch and a whole bunch of years of frequent historical past,” stated Kara-Murza.
Russians and Ukrainians are ethnic Slavs whose statehood dates again to Kyivan Rus, medieval Japanese Europe’s largest state torn aside by Mongols, Poles and Lithuanians.
“However to somebody who belongs to a different tradition, it’s allegedly simpler” to kill Ukrainians, Kara-Murza added.
His remarks made observers and Indigenous rights advocates flinch and fume.
A former Russian diplomat stated “measuring the diploma of 1’s cruelty by their ethnicity is a lifeless finish.”
The Kremlin doesn’t particularly “recruit minorities, they recruit folks from the poorest areas, and people are, as a rule, ethnic autonomies”, Boris Bondarev, who give up his Ministry of International Affairs job in protest in opposition to Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, instructed Al Jazeera.
“Solely a boring man may say that within the warfare’s fourth yr in a multiethnic society,” stated Indigenous peoples activist Dmitry Berezhkov, of the Itelmen nation on Russia’s Pacific peninsula of Kamchatka.
Russian liberal opposition figures, largely middle-class urbanites, “drown as quickly as they tread on the skinny ice” of ethnic minority points, he added.
Ethnic Russians represent greater than two-thirds of Russia’s inhabitants of 143 million. The remainder are minorities – from hundreds of thousands of ethnic Ukrainians and Tatars to smaller Indigenous teams in Siberia and the Arctic which have regional autonomy, albeit largely nominal.
Even in areas wealthy in hydrocarbons, uncommon earths or diamonds, the minorities reside in rural, typically inhospitable areas, co-existing and mingling with ethnic Russians.
All of them depend on Kremlin-funded tv networks greater than city dwellers, typically haven’t any web entry and see the sign-up bonuses and salaries of servicemen preventing in Ukraine as a ticket out of the dire poverty their households reside in.
Recruits obtain as much as $50,000 once they join, and earn a number of thousand {dollars} a month – a fortune for anybody from these areas no matter their ethnic background.
“That is colossal cash for them, they’ll by no means earn it of their lives, regardless of whether or not they’re Buryat or Russian,” Bondarev stated.
In response to a squall of criticism, Kara-Murza wrote on Fb on Monday that the accusations had been mere “lies, manipulations and slander”.
To Berezhkov, the remark additional tainted Kara-Murza’s picture.
“Prior to now, [Kara-Murza’s words] could possibly be seen as a mistake – however now, they’re his place,” he stated.
To a different minority rights advocate, Kara-Murza’s diatribe gave the impression of a “sign for future voters” within the post-war, liberal Russia that exiled Kremlin critics hope to return to.
Oyumaa Dongak, who fled Tyva, a Turkic-speaking province that borders China, thinks Kara-Murza and different exiled Russian opposition leaders are “competing” with Putin.
“It’s not him, it’s us who defend [ethnic] Russians,” she instructed Al Jazeera.
In 2024, Kara-Murza stated Western sanctions imposed on Moscow after the 2022 invasion are “unfair and counterproductive” and damage Russians at giant. He needed the West to carry wider sanctions and as an alternative goal particular person officers.
A Ukrainian observer stated Kara-Murza doesn’t need ethnic Russians who can doubtlessly vote for now-exiled opposition leaders to really feel collective guilt for the atrocities dedicated in Ukraine.
“Folks don’t really feel responsible. Should you membership them within the head with ethical condemnation on daily basis, folks is not going to admit their guilt however will hate anybody who golf equipment them,” Kyiv-based analyst Vyacheslav Likhachyov instructed Al Jazeera.
“That’s why the tales in regards to the atrocities of Chechen executioners and Buryat rapists are and shall be well-liked,” he stated.
Fighters deployed by Chechnya’s pro-Kremlin chief Ramzan Kadyrov had been dubbed a “TikTok military” for staged movies of them “storming” Ukrainian strongholds.
Their precise position within the warfare is usually diminished to guarding occupied areas, terrifying and torturing ethnic Russian servicemen who refuse to combat.
However Buryats, Buddhist natives of a scarcely populated and impoverished area close to Mongolia, have turn out to be infamous in Ukraine in 2022.
Human rights teams and Ukrainian officers recognized private particulars of some Buryat troopers that tortured, raped and killed civilians in Bucha and different cities north of Kyiv.
However as ethnic Buryats are arduous to differentiate from different minority servicemen with distinctly Asian options, Ukrainians typically label all of them “Buryats”, a group activist stated.
“All Caucasus natives are seen as Chechens, and all Asians are thought of Buryats,” Aleksandra Garmazhapova, who helps Buryat males escape mobilisation and flee overseas, instructed Al Jazeera.
Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of servicemen who dedicated alleged warfare crimes in Bucha had been reportedly ethnic Russians.
Garmazhapova survived as a result of Ukrainian forces began shelling Russian positions, and his captors fled to a basement.
“Slavs, Slavs, they had been all Slavs,” Viktor, a Bucha resident who was doused with gasoline by Russian servicemen who positioned bets on how far he would run as soon as they set him on hearth, instructed Al Jazeera in 2022, simply days after his ordeal.