"Trump está a deixar-se fascinar pela lisonja de Putin", diz Kara-Murza, ativista da oposição russa

Name: "Trump está a deixar-se fascinar pela lisonja de Putin", diz Kara-Murza, ativista da oposição russa
Uploaded: 2025-07-31T16:01:26+00:00
Duration: 12 min
Channel: euronews (em português)

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"Trump está a deixar-se fascinar pela lisonja de Putin", diz Kara-Murza, ativista da oposição russa

Vladimir Kara-Murza, ativista da oposição russa e ex-preso político, afirma que a abordagem dos líderes ocidentais a Putin no passado foi "chocante e vergonhosa" e que deu ao atual presidente margem de manobra para corroer a democracia na Rússia.

LEIA MAIS : http://pt.euronews.com/2025/07/31/trump-esta-a-deixar-se-fascinar-pela-lisonja-de-putin-diz-kara-murza-ativista-da-oposicao-

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00:00Nos cuentos com a Européunya agora é o Russians político ativista Vladimir Karamurza.

00:13O ativante 25 anos em prisão em Siderio para criticá-lo contra o russo pandémёр.

00:19Ele foi lançado em 2024 emã de um grupo de COP.

00:22Mas ele conta que, sem toda hora,

00:24ele ainda está optimistic no futuro para que o russo e a Ucrânia.

00:30Vladimir Karamurza, Russian opposition politician, former political prisoner.

00:34Thank you very much for joining us on the Europe Conversation.

00:36Thank you so much for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here.

00:38Now, I'm sure so many people have said this to you, but obviously you should not be here.

00:41You were poisoned in 2015 and 2017. You had a 5% chance of living.

00:46You were told you were in a coma for a month.

00:49And then, just a couple of years ago, you were sentenced to 25 years in prison in Siberia.

00:53And you managed to be released as part of a deal with former U.S. President Joe Biden.

00:59Tell us, first of all, about that.

01:01You know, the first time you got poisoned, what exactly happened?

01:05How did they do it? How did you realize what was happening?

01:07Well, I'd been involved in Russian opposition politics for many years.

01:10I came to work with Boris Nemtsov, who was the most prominent leader of the Russian Democratic Opposition,

01:15former deputy prime minister, who was assassinated in front of the Kremlin, literally, 10 years ago, in 2015.

01:20I came to work with him back in 1999.

01:23And I was myself a candidate for the Russian parliament back in 2003,

01:26when it was still possible for opposition candidates to be on the ballot.

01:28And for many years, Boris Nemtsov and I were involved in the international advocacy campaign

01:34for the passage of Magnetsky Act, so the laws that would introduce targeted personal sanctions

01:39in a form of visa bans and asset freezes against officials of the Putin regime

01:43and of any other dictatorial regime around the world

01:45who are personally complicit in human rights abuses and corruption.

01:50And as you can imagine, that's not a very popular thing in the Kremlin,

01:53because these people, the people around Putin, have long been used to the idea of stealing in Russia.

01:59And I was first poisoned in May of 2015.

02:03I had no doubt from the beginning that it was the Russian Security Service,

02:06but now we know, thanks to an international media investigation led by Bellingcat,

02:10that have identified actually the people, not just the unit, but the specific people, officers in the Russian FSB,

02:16whose task it is to physically liquidate political opponents of Vladimir Putin.

02:20This was May 2015. I was at a meeting with my colleagues in Moscow,

02:23and suddenly I felt that I had difficulty breathing.

02:26And then I felt like I couldn't breathe at all, and I started to sweat.

02:31My heart began to beat really, really fast, and before I knew it, I was unconscious.

02:36It's a very scary feeling to feel that you're dying.

02:39This is what I felt like. I felt that this is the end.

02:40And then I was brought to a hospital, and doctors told my wife that I had about a 5% chance to live.

02:45I was in an artificial life support with a multiple organ failure, in a coma,

02:51and the official diagnosis that was given to me at my Moscow hospital was toxic action by an unidentified substance,

02:58which, you know, translated from medical speak to normal human language means poisoning.

03:02I did survive. The doctors saved my life,

03:05and then I had to basically spend a year to learn to walk again, to learn to use a spoon again.

03:11I mean, everything was just gone.

03:12And then as soon as I was able to, I went back to Russia, and it was in my work,

03:15but then it happened again in February 2017, the exact same thing, same diagnosis, same conditions.

03:19And now, thanks to that amazing Bellingcat investigation,

03:22we know of the existence of this special unit within the Russian FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service.

03:28And so this is the reality of today's Russia, that there is a special government unit whose job it is to physically eliminate,

03:37to murder political opponents of Vladimir Putin.

03:39You're outspoken against the corruption and the sort of sanctimony and so on within Russia,

03:44and that trajectory has left us to a place where it's impossible to have an opposition politician,

03:50people being poisoned, falling out, being thrown out of windows, assassinated on foreign soil and so on.

03:56I mean, how did it get to that point? Was it that the international community ignored Putin?

04:02Well, it was shocking and shameful, frankly, the way many Western leaders behaved when Putin came to power.

04:06You know, there's this myth that is often propagated nowadays by people both inside, but also outside of Russia,

04:12very often for reasons of self-justification.

04:14And the myth is that there was some kind of an early Putin who was supposedly okay, you know,

04:19who believed in reform and modernization and cooperation with the West.

04:21And then something went horribly wrong along the way,

04:25and now it's this Putin who's doing all these things.

04:27Nothing could be further from the truth. Putin was Putin from the very beginning.

04:31In fact, I remember very well the day I understood exactly who that man was and what direction he would take our country.

04:37On the 20th of December, 1999, this was before he became president, he was still prime minister,

04:41he came to Lubyanka Square in Moscow at the former KGB, now FSB headquarters,

04:46to officially unveil a memorial plaque to Yuri Andropov, a longtime former Soviet KGB chief,

04:53who was one of the people instrumental in the 1956 invasion of Hungary,

04:57who was somebody who prioritized the suppression of domestic dissent when he was chairman of the KGB,

05:03somebody who embodied everything that was wrong with the communist system.

05:07And it is to this man that Vladimir Putin chose to unveil a memorial plaque.

05:10In Russia, symbols are important. In Russia, symbols matter.

05:13And I had no more questions. He could not have chosen a more potent symbol to signal the direction of his future rule.

05:19And just in case anybody still had questions, in the first year of his presidency,

05:23Mr. Putin reinstated the Stalin-era Soviet national anthem as the national anthem of the Russian Federation.

05:29What do you think when you heard the likes of US envoy Steve Witkoff praise Vladimir Putin and say,

05:35oh, he prayed for Donald Trump when he got shot at during one of his rallies, and that he's actually a good guy?

05:43Look, Vladimir Putin, of course, is a former KGB officer, and as he once himself publicly admitted,

05:48the favorite part of his job was recruiting people.

05:50And to be a successful recruiter, you need to know what your interlocutor, sort of what kind of person he or she is,

05:57and you need to sort of get in their trust. And that's exactly what he used when he came to power.

06:02George W. Bush was a devout Christian, is a devout Christian, and so when Putin met with him,

06:07he told him the story about a cross that his mother had given him that, you know, survived in this massive fire at his dacha and whatever else.

06:14And that's when President Bush came out and said he looked into his eyes and saw his soul.

06:19And, you know, I think he rightly calculated, Putin did, that the best way to do this with Donald Trump is through personal flattery.

06:27And that's exactly what he did with that conversation about praying for him and also, of course, giving him a painting that Mr. Witkoff brought to Washington.

06:38Look, these are tricks that have been used by Soviet, and not just Soviet security services, for decades.

06:46It's incomprehensible to me how serious people can fall for this kind of stuff in the 21st century.

06:51Let's look at the opposition, because I know for a long time you are very optimistic about the future of Russia.

06:56I still am.

06:57Yeah, that's the thing. Because it doesn't look like there's any hope for optimism.

07:01Putin is alive and well, because I remember for a long time people kind of thought that he might have cancer and so on.

07:06There's no, it doesn't look like there's any chance of him being overthrown.

07:10Boghossian sort of tried that and failed.

07:13I'm not just a politician, I'm also a historian by my education.

07:15And the one thing we know very clearly from the history of Russia is that all major political change in our country happens like this.

07:22Right.

07:22Swiftly, suddenly and completely unexpectedly.

07:25Both the Tsarist regime at the beginning of the 20th century and the Communist regime at the end of the 20th century went down in three days.

07:32Literally, not a metaphor.

07:34This is how things happen in Russia. None of us knows when or how change will come.

07:38What we do know is that nothing is forever.

07:41And everything that had a beginning will have an end.

07:43And every dictatorship in the history of the world has fallen.

07:46Do you have any ideas that there may be anyone within the regime that would be willing to overthrow Putin?

07:54What I do know for sure is that there are many people in Russia, inside Russia today, who completely disagree with this regime,

08:00who categorically oppose this war of aggression.

08:03And, you know, when I was in prison, I would receive thousands of letters from all over the country, every month, from people I'd never met, from towns and cities I've never been to, some of them I hadn't even heard of.

08:10And these were the people who took the time and the risk, by the way, to write to somebody like me, you know, an enemy of the people, using the official prison correspondence system.

08:17And they got those letters to get through to you?

08:18Some did, some didn't, but many did, because they have to go through prison censorship, and of course you need to leave all your contact details and so on.

08:25And people wrote to say that they think like I do, they think the same of this war as I do.

08:31And you will remember last year in 2024, we had a so-called presidential election in Russia with, you know, a circus with Putin and a couple of pre-approved clowns running alongside him on the ballot.

08:41And then suddenly there was this guy, this candidate, a former member of parliament and a lawyer by the name of Boris Nadezhdin, who announced that he would run as the anti-war presidential candidate, saying he's against the war in Ukraine and he would end it on day one.

08:54And the public response was just unimaginable.

08:57Suddenly, all over Russia, in large cities and small towns, you would see hours-long queues of people standing at his campaign offices to sign the ballot nominating petitions, because you need to get a certain number of signatures to be registered as a candidate.

09:12And this was happening all over the country.

09:14And, you know, I would see, in the letters, people would send me the photographs from those long lines, and people were saying how important it was for them.

09:22They gave you hope.

09:22Absolutely, because, you know, the Putin propaganda tries to convince everybody, both in Russia and in the West, that, you know, the Russian society is this monolith, that everybody supports Putin, everybody backs the war.

09:32And, of course, he was not allowed on the ballot, as usually happens in Russia, but that was besides the point, because suddenly people saw that there were people like me, that they were not alone.

09:40Just a final question, because, you know, you're obviously a historian as well.

09:42What was it like to hear you were being sent to prison in Siberia?

09:45Because we hear of Siberia from the Cold War, from the Soviet Union, and just even the image of it straight away.

09:53It's just cruelty, inhumanity, death.

09:56What was it like when you heard that?

09:57And what was it like being in prison in Siberia?

09:59I mean, obviously, you thought you were never coming out.

10:01You were given 25 years.

10:02Yes, I was certain I was going to die there.

10:04And that exchange that took place last year was a miracle.

10:06This is the only way I can describe it.

10:08But as a historian, of course, I've read and reread in prison many memoirs by Soviet dissidents, literature on the Stalin period, of course, Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, and, of course, books going even further back in the 19th century.

10:24The city where I was in prison, for example, Omsk, a large city in western Siberia.

10:29This is where some of the Decembrists were in prison back in the early 19th century.

10:32This was where Dostoevsky was in prison.

10:34And so his letters from the House of the Dead was written on his experience in prison in Omsk.

10:38And then, of course, in the 20th century, Solzhenitsyn was in that transit prison in Omsk and so on.

10:43What was really astonishing to me is that how everything down to the last details is still exactly the same as it was in communist times.

10:50For example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the First Circle, he describes at the very end the route that the prisoners were taken from Moscow to Siberia by.

10:58And they went through the Kuybyshev transit prison.

11:01Kuybyshev today is called Samara, back to its original name.

11:03And that was exactly the route I was taken by the Stalipin carriages, which is the Russian prisoner train transports, which, again, haven't changed in a century.

11:12And so, you know, there's this saying that every historian subconsciously wishes to personally experience the subject of his study.

11:18I guess be careful what you wish for, if that is true.

11:20That's what we're going through your head as well, I'm sure, at the same time.

11:22As well as that you're doomed, but also, this is how I imagined it.

11:27But also, we know how it ends.

11:29We know that none of these regimes continued.

11:32We know that all of these regimes fell.

11:33The Tsarist regime fell.

11:34The Communist regime fell.

11:36And this one, the Putin regime, will fall absolutely any time.

11:39This is the point about Russia.

11:41We don't know.