Kyiv, Ukraine – Vladimir Kara-Murza barely survived two poisoning suspended in 2015 and 2017 that, according to him, were orchestrated by the Kremlin.
The 43 -year -old 43 -year -old man may not be as transmitted as opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who almost dies of similar nerve agents in 2020.
But Kara-Murza, an educated historian in Cambridge, has been essential to convince Western governments of slapping personal sanctions on dozes or Russian officials.
In 2023, a Moscow court sentenced him to 25 years in prison for “betrayal” and, while he was behind bars, he won a Pulitzer award for his columns for the Washington Post.
Liberated last year as part of an exchange of prisoners, Kara-Murza settled in Germany and continued his defense work against the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Moscow War in Ukraine.
But last week, Kara-Murza’s comments on ethnic identity and the alleged military of the blood or the Russian military shook many on both sides of the most popular armed conflict in Europe.
“As it results, [ethnic] The Russians find it difficult to kill the Ukrainians, ”Kara-Murza told the French Senate on Thursday while explaining why the Russian Ministry of Defense recruits ethnic minorities.
“Because [ethnic Russians and Ukrainians] We are the same, we are similar people, we have an almost similar language, the same religion, hundreds and hundreds of years of common history, “said Kara-Murza.
The Russians and the Ukrainians are ethnic Slavs whose state hood dates back to Kyivan Rus, the largest state in Europe in the medieval destroyed by Mongols, Poles and Lithuanians.
“But for someone who belongs to another culture, it is supposedly easier to” kill Ukrainians, Kara-Murza added.
Their comments made observers and defenders of indigenous rights shudder and human.
A former Russian diplomat said that “measuring the degree of cruelty of one for his ethnic group is a dead end.”
The Kremlin does not “recruit minorities, recruit people from the poorest regions, and those are, as a rule, ethnic autonomies,” Boris Bondarev, who resigned from his work from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in protest against the invasion of large -scale Ukraine of Russia in Russia.
“Only a boring man could be that in the fourth year of the war in a multiethnic society,” said the activist of indigenous peoples Dmitry Berezhkov, or the Nation of Itelmen in the Pacific Peninsula of Russia or Kamchatka.
The figures of the Russian liberal opposition, mostly middle -class urbanites, “drown as soon as they step on thin ice” or ethnic minority problems, Hey added.
Ethnic Russians constitute more than two thirds of the population of Russia of 143 million. The rest are minorities, from millions of Ukrainians and ethnic Tartars to smaller indigenous groups in Siberia and the Arctic that have regional autonomy, although mostly nominal.
Only in regions rich in hydrocarbons, rare earth or diamonds, minorities live in rural, often in hospital, coexisting areas and mixed with ethnic Russians.
Everyone trusted the television networks financed by Kremlin more than urban inhabitants, or do not have access to the Internet and see the registration bonds and salaries of the military fighting in Ukraine as a ticket of severe poverty in which their families live.
The recruits receive up to $ 50,000 when they register, and earn several thousand dollars a month, a fortune for any person of those regions in regards to their ethnic background.
“This is colossal money for them, they will never win it in their lives, regardless of whether they are buried or Russians,” said Bondarev.
In response to a chill of criticism, Kara-Murza wrote on Facebook on Monday that the accusations were mere “lies, manipulations and slander.”
For Berezhkov, the comment contaminated the image of Kara-Murza.
“In the past, [Kara-Murza’s words] It could be seen as an error, but now they are his position, “he said.
For another defender of minority rights, Kara-Murza’s diatribe sounded like a “sign for future voters” in the postwar liberal Russia, which exiled Kremlin’s critics to hope to return.
Oyumaa Dongak, who fled from Tyva, a Turkish speech province that limits with China, believes that Kara-Murza and other exile Russian opposition leaders are “competing” with Putin.
“We are not him, it is we who defend [ethnic] The Russians, “he told Al Jazeera.
In 2024, Kara-Murza said that the western sanctions imposed on Moscow after the invasion of 2022 are “unfair and counterproductive” and hurt the Russians in general. I wanted the West to raise broader sanctions and, on the other hand, go to individual officials.
A Ukrainian observer said that Kara-Murza does not want ethnic Russians who can vote potentially so that the leaders of the opposition now demanded feel guilty for the atrocities committed in Ukraine.
“People do not feel guilty. If clubs in their heads with moral condemnation every day, people will not admit their guilt, but will hate anyone who establishes them,” said the Vyacheeseslav Likachyov analyst with headquarters in kyiv to Al Jazeera.
“That is why the stories about the atrocities of Chechenos executioners and Buryat’s rapists are and will be popular,” he said.
The fighters deployed by the pro-Kremlin leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, were called “Tiktok army” for staged videos “assaulting” Ukrainian strengths.
His real role in war is mainly reduced to protecting occupied, scary areas and torturing the ethnic Russian military who refuse to fight.
But the Buryats, the native Buddhists of a barely populated and impoverished region near Mongolia, have become notorious in Ukraine in 2022.
Human rights groups and Ukrainian officials identified personal details of some Buryat soldiers who tortured, violated and killed civilians in Bucha and other cities north of kyiv.
But since ethnic burials are difficult to distinguish from another minority service with clearly Asian, Ukrainian characteristics or label them all “Buryats,” said a community activist.
“All the natives of the Caucasus are seen as Chechen, and all Asians are considered burials,” Aleksandra Garmazhapova told Al Jazeera, who helps Buryat’s men escape the mobilization and flees abroad.
However, most of the military who committed alleged war crimes in Bucha were ethnic Russians.
Garmazhapova survived because the Ukrainian forces began bombing Russian positions, and their captors fled to a basement.
“Eslavos, Eslavos, all were Slavs,” said Viktor, a bucha resident who was a fuel for the Russian service that they bet on how far it would come once they set it on, he told Al Jazeera in 2022, just a few days later.