For this Russian dissident, holding Putin accountable was almost deadly — twice
On Jan. 9, the Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza celebrated a signal victory in a long campaign to hold Vladimir Putin’s regime accountable for its human rights crimes. The outgoing Obama administration announced sanctions against Gen. Alexander Bastrykin, a close Putin confidant who heads the state investigative committee — the instrument used to persecute opposition activists with trumped-up criminal charges.
Kara-Murza, who divides his time between Moscow and Washington, had long campaigned for the designation of Bastrykin, just as he had pushed for passage of the law under which the general was targeted — the Sergei Magnitsky Act, which mandates sanctions on Russians involved in repression and corruption. For years Bastrykin “seemed too powerful to be sanctioned,” Kara-Murza exulted in a Jan. 12 blog post. “That ceiling is now gone.”
Exactly three weeks later, back in Russia, Kara-Murza felt a horrific and all-too-familiar sensation: His organs were beginning to shut down. He concluded immediately that he had been poisoned, just as he had been once before, in May 2015. His family rushed him to a hospital, where a doctor who helped save his life in the previous instance was waiting. Within hours he was in a coma, where he remained for a week.
Snip........“It’s revenge for the Magnitsky law, pure and simple,” Kara-Murza told me. “It’s the main thing they are afraid of. They have mastered the ways of silencing the opposition at home.
For now the only thing they are really afraid of is Western countries closing the havens where they stash their money and send their families.”https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/for-this-russian-dissident-holding-putin-accountable-was-almost-deadly--twice/2017/03/19/d1010aa6-0a66-11e7-b77c-0047d15a24e0_story.html?utm_term=.768ce75a30cc
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