Vladimir Kara-Murza holds up his expired Russian passport at a press conference in Bonn, Germany, following his release in a prisoner swap, 2 August 2024. Photo: EPA / CHRISTOPHER NEUNDORF
Exiled Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza has accused the Kremlin of reviving the Soviet-era practice of stripping dissidents of their Russian citizenship after the Russian Embassy in Washington rejected his application for a new passport.
In a post on his Telegram channel on Thursday, Kara-Murza described the embassy’s refusal to grant him a new passport due to restrictions on his right to leave the Russian Federation, even though he has been living in the United States since being freed from a lengthy prison sentence in Russia as part of a major prisoner exchange with the West in August 2024.
“The Putin regime has returned to the Soviet practice of depriving political opponents of their own country’s citizenship. No one is formally deprived of citizenship, of course, but it is impossible to apply one’s citizenship in practice without a valid passport,” Kara-Murza wrote.
Prior to his release alongside other prominent opposition politicians Ilya Yashin and Andrey Pivarov last August, Kara-Murza had been serving a 25-year prison sentence for treason, involvement with “undesirable organisations”, and for “disseminating false information” about the Russian military.
According to independent Russian news outlet Mediazona, exiled opposition activists Liliya Chanysheva and Ksenia Fadeyeva, both had their passport renewal applications rejected by the Russian Embassy in Lithuania, although one was eventually granted to Fadeyeva.
Kara-Murza, one of Russia’s highest profile opposition politicians, is a contributing columnist at The Washington Post, and was formerly a co-chair of the Foundation for Freedom, a non-profit organisation supporting Russian activists, journalists, and researchers founded by murdered opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, Kara-Murza’s political mentor.
In May 2024, Kara-Murza was awarded a Pulitzer prize for his Washington Post columns, with the citation noting that he had insisted “on a democratic future for his country,” despite being “under great personal risk”.
Twice, in 2015 and 2017, Kara-Murza was near-fatally poisoned and left in a coma, in what were widely believed to have been assassination attempts by Russia’s Federal Security Service, suspicions backed up by a subsequent investigation by Bellingcat and The Insider.