Vladimir Kara-Murza speaks at The Royal United Services Institute in London, 20 September 2024. Photo: EPA / Tolga Akmen

Exiled Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was released from a Russian penal colony as part of a political prisoner exchange with the West in August 2024 and now lives in the United States, has been declared wanted by the Russian Interior Ministry, Mediazona reported on Monday.

Kara-Murza’s addition to Russia’s wanted list was posted on the Interior Ministry’s website, though no information about the nature of the criminal case against him was given.

Following the rejection of his application for a new passport at the Russian Embassy in Washington DC earlier this year, Kara-Murza accused the Russian government of effectively stripping dissidents of their citizenship. The embassy justified its decision by citing a letter from the Russian Federal Bailiff Service and an active travel ban preventing his departure from Russia.

A close associate of assassinated Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, Kara-Murza earned the Kremlin’s enmity in the late 2000s by working with Western campaigners for the introduction of the US Magnitsky Act, which sanctioned Russian officials deemed responsible for the death of Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow prison in 2009.

In 2023, Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison for treason, the disseminating of “false information” about the Russian army, and his affiliation with an “undesirable organisation” for his work with exiled Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia.

In August, criminal cases were opened in absentia against Kara-Murza and fellow opposition figures Yulia Navalnaya and Ilya Yashin for their alleged “participation in a terrorist organisation”, “calls for extremism”, and “organising an extremist community”, over an anti-war rally they led in Berlin on 1 March.