Jailed Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza has been transferred to a prison hospital and his lawyers were denied access to their client, his wife said Friday.
Kara-Murza, 42, suffers from health problems that his wife Evgenia and lawyers say are directly related to alleged attempts to poison him. Russian authorities have refused to investigate the incidents in 2015 and 2017, when Kara-Murza fell seriously ill.
Prison authorities informed Kara-Murza’slawyers during a mid-Thursday visit that he had been moved from the maximum-security facility to a prison hospital in another part of the city of Omsk, Evgenia wrote on Facebook.
Doctors at that hospital stalled Kara-Murza’s lawyers’ attempts to reach him for two days, she added.
“Thus, the lawyers were never able to see Vladimir and make sure that everything was fine with him ahead of the weekend,” said Evgenia Kara-Murza.
Fears for the prominent dissident’s health have grown since the opposition activist Alexei Navalny died in prison under unclear circumstances in February.
Kara-Murza, a citizen of both Russia and the United Kingdom, was sentenced to 25 years in prison in April 2023 after criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and calling on Western countries to impose sanctions against the Kremlin.
A Moscow court had found him guilty of treason, spreading “false” information about the Russian army and having links to an "undesirable organization.” The sentence, one of the longest against a Russian opposition figure in recent years, drew immediate condemnation from Western countries.