WTH is going on in ? Vladimir Kara- Murza on his arrest, the attempted murder of , and the growing anti-Putin movement inside Russia

Episode #94 | March 17, 2021 | Danielle Pletka, Marc Thiessen, and Vladimir Kara-Murza

Danielle Pletka: Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.

Marc Thiessen: And I'm Marc Thiessen.

Danielle Pletka: Welcome to our podcast, , what the hell is going on now?

Marc Thiessen: What the hell is going on is we have a podcast today that reminded me of why I got into foreign policy and why I had a passion for the battle for freedom. We just had a conversation with, and you're about to hear an interview, with Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is one of the courageous leaders of the Russian opposition. We spoke to him from Moscow and it's very fortuitous we were even able to get him because if we had scheduled this interview even a couple of days earlier, we would have been unable to have it because Vladimir Kara-Murza was in a prison cell.

He was rounded up with all of the democratically elected opposition leaders from the local and municipal governments around the country who had gathered in Moscow to have a meeting. And the Putin regime rounded them up, arrested them, sent them to prisons, and is now going to prosecute them for collaborating with a hostile foreign organization, apparently the local governments of Russia are hostile foreign organizations. This guy is so courageous. He's been poisoned twice by the Putin regime and survived. And he is undaunted. He speaks out. He exercises the right of free speech, even when it comes at a huge political cost to him, to his family, to his friends. And this was just such an inspiring conversation. I'm so glad that he was able to join us today.

Danielle Pletka: I couldn't agree with you more. And one of the things that you all will hear from him is just how the Putin government has stopped pretending.

Marc Thiessen: Yeah.

Danielle Pletka: This is one of those things, and you hear us talking about these tangentially when we had Jonathan Swan on to talk about Nord Stream and the Russians, hypocrisy

2 over helping Putin with one hand and sanctioning him with the other. This is something you hear in the context of the Trump administration. But what I think we failed to pay attention to as much because we spend so much time talking about ourselves, is what's happening in Russia. And the backsliding, the re- Sovietization of the Russian Federation is remarkable, notable, and particularly because it happens not just in foreign policy, not just in Syria, and not just in Libya, not just in trying to interfere in our elections, in European elections, and in invading Ukraine and Georgia, not just that, but that this is happening at home. And because we don't pay as much attention to that, has exploited what I can only call our ignorance and our indifference to crack down in ways on the Russian people that I think deserve a great deal more attention.

Marc Thiessen: And it also shows how fragile his regime is. This is the myth of Putin as the strong man. I'm sorry, a strong man isn't afraid of a bunch of local mayors gathering in Moscow to talk about how to make the country better.

Marc Thiessen: A strong man isn't afraid of Alexei Navalny coming home after recovering from a poisoning and speaking out against him. What is he afraid of? One of the things that Vladimir, and I don't want to spoil the interview, but one of the things Vladimir points out is that we have this myth that Putin is popular, right? That "Yeah, well, polls show that the Russian people really think the collapse of the was a disaster, and that Putin is bringing back a strong Russia." For those of us who've studied tyrannical and totalitarian regimes, it's always the myth of the popularity of the regime, that there's a number of people who really like this power. They like the strength of the regime. And it's always a lie. They're always brittle on the inside. That's why they take these actions.

Because if Vladimir Putin was so popular, then why doesn't he just have a fair election with Alexei Navalny and trounce him? What are you afraid of? Why do you have to put Alexei Navalny in jail? It's because you're afraid you'd lose. Because the truth is the Russian people do not support Vladimir Putin. They don't support repression. They want to live in freedom. They want to have the opportunity to build a better life for their family, have accountable government. And if Vladimir Putin went into a free election with Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Kara- Murza, or the dog catcher of Moscow, he would lose that election.

Danielle Pletka: That's one of the stories Vladimir tells us. We're going to play the full interview, unedited for you. And the only thing we ask your forbearance on is that we had to do it over Skype, so the sound is not quite as perfect as you're used to from Marc's mellifluous voice. Vladimir Kara-Murza, for those few of you who don't know who he is, was a protege of the now dead, murdered Russian opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov. He is the vice-chairman of Open Russia, which is an organization that was founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, someone who also spent 10 years in prison trying to oppose Vladimir Putin. He's the author of two documentaries, one called They Chose Freedom and another on Nemtsov himself that is just fantastic. He's a good friend to many of us here at AEI, and I was really happy when he agreed to join us despite everything that's going on in Moscow these days.

Marc Thiessen: Here's our interview.

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

3 Well, Vladimir, welcome to the podcast.

Vladimir Kara-M...: Great to be on your podcast. Thank you so much for having me.

Marc Thiessen: We're very excited that you're here because we almost missed you because you were arrested this weekend. Can you tell us what happened, and why we're so lucky to have you with us?

Vladimir Kara-M...: Well, I have to say I've been in Russian politics for quite a while now, and I've seen many things as you know. But I have to say that what happened on Saturday was actually unprecedented, because an entire conference of elected municipal lawmakers from across Russia was detained by the police. The whole conference was detained. And so about 200 people were taken and driven around different police stations in Moscow. About 150 of them were elected municipal lawmakers. So, the idea was to try to gather a forum, a conference, of elected opposition legislators from all over the country. The municipal level is really the last level of politics in Russia where it's still possible to have some pluralism, some competition, some free debate, sometimes even more or less honest elections. And in fact, in the last couple of years, several hundreds of independent or opposition activists and local political leaders have been elected to these seats on municipal councils all across the country, from the Baltic to the Pacific, literally.

And so, we thought it a good idea to try to coordinate this new sort of generation of rising pro-democracy political leaders. And the idea was to hold the first national conference, the first national forum, of these independent and opposition elected municipal legislators. Well, the authorities presumably thought this was also a good idea for us, so they made sure it didn't happen. But the way they did this was actually pretty surprising even for those of us who are seasoned in the Russian opposition.

Usually, when the authorities try to sabotage our events, it would be something like a pipe suddenly burst in the hotel, or all the electricity would go off, or there would be a bomb scare. What happened this time was that they actually allowed the forum to start, and then about 20 minutes in, about 80 full-gear armed police officers marched into the room, and a police colonel took the microphone from the moderator. We were only just having our first session, but my spot was taken by this Moscow police colonel who announced to the entire room that everybody was being detained on the charge of assisting an undesirable, foreign organization.

And I said this a few times, but I have no other way of describing this, I think Franz Kafka would have been ashamed of himself because his imagination would be nowhere near describing the situation we have in Russia under the Putin regime today, where you have elected municipal legislators, the people who have a democratic mandate from Russian voters detained by police because they're considered an undesirable foreign organization. By the way, just as an aside, today, there was an official delegation from Hezbollah here in Moscow at the invitation of the Russian foreign ministry. That's not an undesirable organization. That's okay. Hezbollah is fine, but elected municipal lawmakers from the Russian opposition, no, no, no.

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

4 So, we were all seized by police. We were all taken into different paddy wagons or about 15 of those specially equipped police buses, and we were driven around to different police stations because there were too many people to fit into one or two. Originally, we were planning to have different titles, different sections of the forum according to subject and interest, and in the end, we ended up, I guess, in different territorial sections, depending to which police station we were taken to. And we were held there for the whole day, till Saturday evening. And at the end of that very long day, every single person, so about 200 people, about 150 of them elected lawmakers, were charged with the administrative offense of assisting an undesirable foreign organization, and the trials are going to start this coming Wednesday, the 17th of March.

I don't know yet when my own trial is. So, some of our colleagues have already been handed their trial summons, the court summons. I haven't had mine yet. And I actually asked a very nice, polite young lady who was the prosecutor who was charging me, I asked her how long does she expect the summons to take to arrive? And she first said very seriously to me that, "It's not up to us, it's up to the court." And then she smiled and said, "But I don't think they'll take too long with you." And I said, "Yes, I don't think that either." So, I just want to take this opportunity to thank the Moscow Prosecutor Service for giving me those couple of days between the detention and the trial, that I'm able to join your podcast today.

Marc Thiessen: Why do you think they've become so much more brazen? I mean, you just described how they used to use this subterfuge, the pipe would break. Now they're just marching in, in riot gear, and rounding people up. I mean, what's changed?

Vladimir Kara-M...: Some of it is the brazenness of it, but it's also the fact that they are no longer keeping up the appearances. No more pretenses of a quasi-legal nature. Because that's what they used to do as well. So, I mean, for many years, the Putin government has been persecuting and prosecuting political opponents. Mikhail Khodorkovsky spent more than a decade in prison, but of course, the official charge was not political, it was oil and tax evasion and whatever. And even when they used to arrest opposition activists at rallies, they would always make up a pretext, like somebody was cursing in public, or they would plant drugs, as the Moscow Police did with the German, Ivan Golunov, a couple of years ago. Now, they don't need that anymore. The whole conference of municipal lawmakers was arrested because it was a conference of municipal lawmakers. This is it.

Obviously, I don't need to tell you nobody in that room had anything to do with any foreign undesirable organization. In fact, I had people, young municipal legislators, from across Russia. We had people from 56 different regions of Russia at that conference. They were coming up to me when we were held together in that police station and they were asking me, "What's this organization?" It's Open Russia, it's the organization founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky. And of course, many of them had first heard about it when they read it in the indictment and of course, obviously, they have nothing to do with it.

I think the answer to your question is, well, first of all, the one that's most obvious, of course, this is an election year. Six months from now in September,

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

5 September the 19th, we will have parliamentary elections here in Russia. And for many years it was enough for the Putin regime to maintain its dominance of legislatures and politics at all levels in Russia by various manipulative tricks. So of course, the media is all controlled. And of course, the pro-regime candidates have vast administrative advantages. And then they would start putting pressure on the opposition. Then they would start disqualifying opposition candidates to make sure there's no way for the pro-regime candidates to lose. But as the years go by, as the new generation in Russia is growing up, more and more people are getting fed up with Vladimir Putin. I mean you can get fed up with anyone after they've been in power for 20 years and after you've watched their face for your whole adult lives, in the case of many of these people now, on the television screen.

So, none of these tricks work anymore. And even when the regime disqualifies real opponents from the ballot, pro-Putin candidates are still losing to literally anybody, just some technical spoilers who happen to be on the ballot with them. We saw that most spectacularly during the Moscow City Council elections in 2019, when all the major opposition candidates were taken off the ballot, most of them were jailed for the duration of the campaign. And yet in nearly half of the districts at the Moscow City Council, pro-Kremlin candidates, including the leader of the ruling party, United Russia in Moscow, was sent to humiliating defeats in the face of nobodies.

My favorite story was in the north of Moscow, in the Tushino district, where a good friend of mine, Alexander Solovyov, who's a well-known opposition activist who was running for a seat on the city council, he was disqualified from the ballot. He was put in jail. But there was another man by the same name, Alexander Solovyov, a classic spoiler tactic. When the real Alexander was running, they registered this guy to try to confuse voters. And I guess they just forgot to take him off while the real one was disqualified. And so, a few days before the vote, Alexei Navalny and his movement issued an appeal to Muscovites asking them to vote for these random nobodies in different districts around Moscow, to send the message to the Kremlin. And in nearly half of the districts this happened; those nobodies won in a landslide. And this happened with the fake Solovyov too. He's never been in the district. He hasn't held a single campaign rally. He hasn't met a single voter. He hasn't spent a dime on electioneering.

Vladimir Kara-M...: He won in a landslide against the pro-regime candidate, and the electoral commission spent three days trying to locate where this guy was to tell him that he's now an elected member of the Moscow City Council. I mean, it's a humorous story, but there's a very serious behind it that for so many people in Russia, especially the younger generation in big cities like Moscow, like Petersburg, like the big cities in Siberia, Novosibirsk, are getting so fed up with Putin that they're looking for any way possible to send that message.

And so of course the government is worried as we approach the parliamentary elections in September. And so, we're sort of, not one but two strokes of a pen in this case, because two of these administrative convictions under this article that we were all detained under on Saturday, two of these within 12 months would mean the possibility of a criminal conviction, not only with the real prison terms,

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

6 but also with disqualification from any kinds of election at any level. So that's why they're doing it particularly this year to answer your question.

Danielle Pletka: Vladimir thank you for being with us. Let's step backwards a little bit. So, for people who know, sure, Putin is kind of a bad guy, must be a bad guy, because Donald Trump liked him. And sure, he's squashing some rights, but he's still got legitimate popularity in Russia. So, let's step back a second and talk about what's wrong with Vladimir Putin, both the politics and the corruption, because I think it's important that people have a baseline of understanding about why it is that people like you and your 200 compatriots this weekend need to meet.

Vladimir Kara-M...: Well, to be honest, I don't even know where we could start with this, because it's of course been more than two decades since Mr. Putin has been in power. We could talk at length about the way elections in our country have become a meaningless ritual, where opposition candidates are disqualified, where all the media are controlled by the state. In fact, where all the major media outlets serve as government propaganda mouthpieces, just spewing hate on a daily basis against the opposition, against the West, against the United States, against anybody who disagrees with Putin, calling us traitors and foreign agents and all the rest of it.

We have a situation where, if you try to exercise your right to peacefully demonstrate, we get beaten up, you get arrested, you can lose your job, you can get expelled from university. We have a situation where we have hundreds of political prisoners in Russia today, and that's by a very conservative count. According to the latest numbers from the Memorial Human Rights Center, which is the most respected human rights organization in Russia, which has of course been designated as a foreign agent by the Putin regime, that's one of the many tricks that they're using to try to smear anybody who's against him, by labeling NGOs they don't like as foreign agents, or undesirable organizations.

But according to Memorial, the latest number of political prisoners in Russia is 378. That's a very conservative estimate. It only takes account of those people whose cases Memorial has studied, and only those who correspond to the very strict Council of Europe criteria of who actually can be considered a legitimate political prisoner. That number is 378. In the late years of the Soviet Union in January 1987, during the Vienna meeting of the Conference on Security and Co- operation in Europe, the Soviet government admitted the existence of 200 political prisoners in the Soviet Union. That was of course also an underestimate, but so is this one. And the number now under Putin is almost double what it was in the late Soviet Union.

And we can talk about a lot of things. The lack of any political freedom, the lack of any way for citizens to participate in running our own country, the fact that parliament has long been turned into a rubber stamp. It looks more like the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, or the Reichstag in Nazi Germany with not a single voice in opposition. We can speak about all of this and it will take a very long time, but frankly, I think it will be enough to say one thing.

Just over two weeks ago, we held a memorial vigil on the bridge, right outside of the Kremlin to mark the sixth anniversary of the assassination of Boris Nemtsov,

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

7 the Russian opposition leader, the most prominent, the most effective, the most well-known, the most popular political opponent of Vladimir Putin. The most prominent voice in opposition to the corruption and authoritarianism of the administration, the former deputy prime minister of Russia, who was gunned down in the Kremlin's shadow, literally, on February 27th, 2015. The most high- profile, the most brazen political assassination in the modern history of Russia.

Six years on, the organizers and masterminds continue to enjoy full protection from the highest levels of the Russian state. If you can murder the opposition leader and get away with it, I don't think it's really meaningful to talk about any other human rights abuses or any other regression. That's the reality we're living under with Vladimir Putin.

And, as to that tired old propaganda line, that is sometimes still bought by people in the West, Dany, thank you for posing this question, because I'm astonished at how often I still hear from Western audiences, including informed Western audiences that, "Yes, Putin's bad, we would not like him, but Russians like him, he's popular." I only have one question to that. If he was really as popular as you said, why didn't he allow a single free election in the 20 years he's been in power? Wouldn't he win it if he so popular? Why does he feel the need to disqualify opponents, imprison opponents, murder opponents? Why does he feel the need to control every single major media outlet? Why does he feel the need to rig elections and stuff the ballots and beat up peaceful protestors who try to demonstrate against that fraud?

No, that's not the behavior of somebody who's popular. That's the behavior of someone who is weak and insecure. And looking at recent trends in Russian public opinion, especially looking at the way young people have been energized by Alexei Navalny and his movement. The hundreds of thousands that came out onto the streets all across Russia in January to protest the arrest of Alexei Navalny, knowing that they will be beaten up, they will be arrested, they will be detained. They may be sacked from their jobs or expelled from universities, and people still went in their hundreds of thousands.

The regime sees all that. And that's why they're so afraid of their own people. The biggest fear of any dictatorship is that of their own people. And that is Putin's biggest fear as well. And frankly, I have to say there are fewer and fewer people in the West who do buy into the sold propaganda line, just because, when people think even for a minute about this, the answer becomes obvious. So, I think very soon we will see only, what used to be called fellow travelers in the Soviet times, those people in the West who have their own purpose, whatever this may be, for being the Kremlin's voice in the West. There'll always be people like this. There always have been, there always will be.

Marc Thiessen: One of the people he tried to murder is you. You've survived two poisonings. You recently had an op-ed in the Washington Post which was titled, "I called up my would-be killer, he didn't want to talk." You spoke to the man who poisoned you. First of all, tell us what that conversation was like and what happened to you for those who are not familiar?

Vladimir Kara-M...: Well, I'll start with the second part because that'll be quicker. The conversation

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

8 wasn't very long. I was given the phone number, I called it, I said the man's name to make sure it's actually him on the phone. He confirmed that, yes, it is him. And then I said my name, at which point he hung up and switched off his phone. Two times, twice, in May of 2015 and February of 2017, I ended up in a coma in intensive care in a hospital here in Moscow, both times with a multiple organ failure, both times with a diagnosis of toxic action by an unidentified substance. That's what doctors wrote. And both times, the doctors told my wife I had a 5% chance to survive.

So, I cannot describe how grateful and fortunate I feel to be able to even sit here and speak with you today. There was never any doubt in my mind, or in the minds of my colleagues and friends and many other people that those were both deliberate poisonings, that they were orchestrated by the Russian authorities, that they had the intent to kill. Because when you have a 95% chance of dying, that's not a way to scare someone. And that the reason for both of those murder attempts was my longtime work, my longtime advocacy in support of targeted Western sanctions in the form of visa bans and asset freezes, against those high- ranking human rights abusers and corrupt officials in Vladimir Putin's close circles.

The Magnitsky Laws, I've been involved in that work for more than a decade now. It was Boris Nemtsov who got me involved in this work. He called The Magnitsky Act the most pro-Russian law in the history of any foreign country, because it targets those individuals who abuse the rights of Russian citizens and who steal the money of Russian taxpayers, and then take that stolen money and spend it and stash it away in the West. Those are the people those sanctions are directed against, and I'm proud of the work I've done on this, and I'm proud that so many countries today and jurisdictions including United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and the European Union, have those laws on the books. And we are working with other countries, including Australia and Japan, to make sure it happens there as well.

But of course, as you can imagine, that's not very popular for the Kremlin. So, there was never any doubt in my mind that that was the reason for the poisonings. But I must say it's very different. It's one thing when you understand something intellectually, but it's very different when they actually show you the people who did this to you. The faces, the names, this was an amazing media investigation conducted by Bellingcat, an international media consortium, The Insider, a Russian independent media outlet and Der Spiegel, the German magazine.

And in the course of that investigation, they have identified four specific officers of the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB, the main domestic successor to the Soviet KGB, who were following me around Russia, around the different regions, on at least seven different regional trips in the months leading up to both of my hospitalizations. Two of those FSB officers, including the one I spoke with on the phone, came from the Directorate for the Protection of Constitutional Order. This is the sort of the Gestapo under Putin, the political police, the successor to the Soviet KGB director that used to target dissidence.

And two others came from the unit that specializes in chemical weapons called

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

9 the FSB Criminalistics Institute. By the way, they're the same people who were previously identified as having been behind the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny last year, it's the same people who are doing these things. One of those chemical weapons specialists was with me in the city of Kazan in May of 2015, 48 hours before I ended up in a coma in intensive care. So, presumably he was the person who actually entered my hotel room and put something on my clothes.

What struck me most, I think, was the banality of evil, that phrase. I was looking at the faces, just normal human faces. I walk out on the street here in Moscow, I see many faces like this. And these people are professional assassins in the employment of the state. Their job is to kill people. Their job is to physically liquidate opponents of Vladimir Putin. Alexei Navalny and I were fortunate to survive, many others were not. So, these people are actually murderers. And you look at them and you know, just a regular human face. What do these people talk about at family dinner table? How many people they poisoned today? It's mind boggling. We're talking about this as if it's something normal, but it's anything but.

And there's really an Orwellian twist about this as well. You remember in the novel, 1984, they had the ministry of truth that engaged in propaganda. There was the ministry of peace that waged wars, and so on. Well, we have today in Russia, the FSB Director for the Protection of Constitutional Order that organizes political murders. And we have the FSB Criminalistics Institute that is tasked with detecting and counteracting the use of prohibitive chemical weapons, that actually itself uses prohibited chemical weapons to go after the opponents of Vladimir Putin.

That's the situation we're living with. And I think sometimes it's just worth taking a step back and just saying to oneself, that in the 21st century, a European country is operating a professional squad of assassins in the employment of the state whose job it is to murder opponents of the government. That is the reality. As soon as the investigation came out, I went together with my lawyer to the Russian investigative committee, which is sort of our equivalent of the American FBI to file criminal charges against those specific FSB officers.

We had previously made two requests for criminal investigation into attempted murder after both poisonings in 2015 and 2017. To this date, I have not received a response from them as to whether or not the case has been initiated. This time in February, we went not just with general words, but with actually specific facts, dates, and names of these people. This week will be one month since we filed the request, by Russian law, they have to respond within one month. So, we will see if any response comes in. Of course, if it does, we know what it is going to be. And so, it's clear that I will have to seek justice through the courts. Again, we know everything about the court system in Russia under Putin.

So, I will, of course be taking this all the way up to the European Court of Human Rights. Russia thankfully is a member of the Council of Europe. So, we as Russian citizens have access to that court. The only recourse for justice we have, especially in politically motivated cases, because in this case, we are talking about two attempts to violate the most important right guaranteed under the

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

10 European Convention of Human Rights. And that is the right to life.

Danielle Pletka: Vladimir let me pursue this question a little bit further. So, we don't need to go into the whole history of the poisoning of Alexei Navalny with whom you work closely. But he also was attacked. He also was poisoned using what the German government has confirmed is Novichok, which is a banned nerve weapon, essentially, that was placed on his clothing. He too worked with Bellingcat to investigate the provenance. And they've done an amazing job, and I commend to everybody the video that Navalny put together in which he actually got through to his would-be killers and actually spoke at length with one of them, somebody I imagine who's no longer employed by the Russian government. But you had a slightly different situation. You came to the United States after the second attempt on your life. And with the support of members of Congress, including John McCain, the late Senator, you gave a blood sample to the FBI, in an effort to also ascertain the means that were being used to try to kill you by the Russians.

But weirdly, or maybe not weirdly, the FBI won't tell you what they discovered. Can you just help us understand what's going on there? Because I think that little, little sliver of information gives people a window into the complexity and the problem of Russia policy.

Vladimir Kara-M...: Well, this is actually the most puzzling aspect of the whole situation, for me. I was shocked when I saw the actual people who tried to kill me, but I was not surprised. And I was not surprised that the Putin regime would do this. I was not surprised that the Russian Investigative Committee didn't even respond to us. I'm not going to be surprised later this week when we get a denial of criminal charges against these FSB officers. This is all to be expected.

But for the life of me, I cannot explain why the American government would hide the method by which a Russian opposition politician was poisoned in Russia. And what at all that has to do with any possible US interest.

You're absolutely right in your description, except for one small amendment. I wasn't in a position to give anything to anyone, or to do much anything for a few weeks out of the hospital. It was my wife, Yevgenia, who obtained a blood sample in the Moscow hospital, and took it to the US, to Washington, and handed it over to FBI officers.

They didn't have to do anything. I'm not an American citizen. The crime was obviously not committed on American soil. But friends in Congress did ask, including the late Senator McCain. And they did take the samples. They did test them. And then they classified the results. And they refused to give those results to me, which is actually quite absurd, because those are the results of my own blood tests, right? But they refused to give them to me.

They refused to give them to members of Congress themselves, including Senator McCain, who had asked for them. Also, Senator Rubio, Senator Wicker, Senator Ben Cardin, then Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

What's interesting also, that they all received those denials orally, by telephone.

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

11 And I think Senator McCain actually had a personal meeting with one of the FBI officials. No paper trail, no letters have gone out. Nothing.

They all wrote on paper, and they got nothing on paper. They got oral rejections. "No, we're not going to give this to you."

Germans couldn't get this either, through the Freedom of Information Act. I filed my own Freedom of Information Act request, which was not officially denied, but it was just basically not responded to. Actually, sort of in the same way that the Russian Investigative Committee handled my two requests for a criminal investigation.

And so in February of 2020, a little more than a year ago, I had no other recourse but to take the United States Department of Justice to court, to an American court, to an American lawyer, Stephen Rademaker, one of the top lawyers in Washington, DC, who took up my case completely pro bono, for which I'm deeply grateful. Because he was, I think, as indignant as everybody else who hears about this behavior from the US government.

So, thanks to him, and his brilliant team of lawyers, in the course of this year, we have received hundreds of pages of materials of documents from the FBI. Most of them heavily redacted, but we did get some important information.

For example, there was very clear conclusion that what had happened to me was deliberate poisoning. Not that this was news to me, or to anyone. But it was important to have this. This was before the banning Bellingcat investigation had identified specific FSB officers who did this.

And then the second interesting thing that we did find out, which may provide part of the answer to your question, Dany, was that, in January of 2018, when the three heads of Russia's main security services, the FSB, the SVR, and the GRU visited Washington DC, and met with their American counterparts, that my case, my poisonings, were discussed at those meetings. We did get confirmation of that through that lawsuit against the Department of Justice.

What we did not get are the test results. So, the actual reason for this whole exercise, we did not so far, get. About 15 pages remain classified, outright classified by the Bureau. About 200 more pages have been sent for consultations with other federal agencies. They're not saying which ones. They are not giving us any timeline.

And it had been suggested several times over these past few years, that the reason for this classification is, in fact, that meeting in January 2019, that there was some kind of a deal made between the American and the Russian Security Service Chiefs, presumably favor in exchange for a favor, something the Russian side did that the Americans asked for. And then the Russian Security Chiefs asked them not to make my results public.

I have to tell you, I did not initially believe that. Because I'm not at all a conspiratorial type. Usually, explanations in life are much simpler. But I have to

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

12 say, now that it's been several years, and the US Department of Justice is still refusing, even in the face of a lawsuit now, to hand out that most important information, perhaps there is something to that theory.

We'll see if anything changes now that there's a new administration in Washington. As far as I know, in the last few days, Merrick Garland took over as the new US Attorney General. He has the authority, as far as I understand, with one stroke of a pen, to declassify those missing pages. Let's see what happens.

Marc Thiessen: So, I want to ask you about something that has been in the news relating to Russia here in the US. And it's been in the sports pages. There's a professional hockey player named Artemi Panarin, who plays for the .

Danielle Pletka: Yeah, we should stop and say, Marc is a hockey fanatic. And his team is the New York Rangers.

Marc Thiessen: Yes.

Danielle Pletka: Just so you understand the context.

Marc Thiessen: And I'm very proud that our Russian superstar is not a shill for Vladimir Putin the way the Washington Capitals' Alex Ovechkin is a shill for Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Kara-M...: Right.

Marc Thiessen: But Panarin did something which was actually very courageous. He was in St. Petersburg in 2019. And he gave an interview where he basically said that Putin no longer understands what's right and wrong.

And he said, there's this belief in our society, you can't say bad things about the government, or you'll get killed or poisoned. This should not be happening. And he said, I'm more of a patriot than those who hush up the problems. They're playing with other people's emotions by saying you have to love your country no matter what or hate others. I think that's wrong. If I see issues and don't talk about them, it's a greater treason than when I talk about them.

This season, he tweeted out an Instagram picture of Navalny and saying, "Stand with Navalny."

And then all of a sudden, he had to take a leave of absence from the Rangers because some allegations came out from his former KHL hockey coach that he had beaten up a woman in Riga, Latvia. And he left the team to deal with this. And he disappeared for a while. He's finally come back. No one knows what happened.

Could you just talk a little bit about, just the idea that the Russian regime and its enablers can reach over here into the United States and take an athlete who dares to speak out and exercise free speech, which he has here that he doesn't have at home, and affect his life in this way. What does that say about the regime and what do you know about his case?

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

13 Vladimir Kara-M...: I have heard about this, of course. And I have to say that it was, of course, very important for many people here in Russia that he did voice those views publicly. Because for years, we got too used to these sports figures and cultural figures who will just tow the regime's line. There are fewer and fewer of them, it has to be said, and there are more and more people who are willing to actually publicly voice some independent views, which in itself is an important trend. And that goes both for people outside of Russia, but also most importantly, for people who are here in Russia.

And we can see this clearly. And I think, actually to me, one of the most visible signs of this change, of his shift, was when in 2019, after that Moscow election that we talked about, after there were mass protests against the disqualification of opposition candidates, after there were mass arrests, and several people actually got real life prison terms for participating in a peaceful opposition rally. Some of them are still in prison today, almost two years old.

There were many different groups who publicly spoke out in support of these political prisoners, against their arrest, against the beating up peaceful demonstrators. There will be sports people, actors, writers, journalists, all kinds of different groups.

But I think what was really surprising for many people was that a very large group, more than 100, serving Russian Orthodox priests have signed a public petition in defense of those political prisoners, and protesting against their arrests.

Usually, the Russian Orthodox church has an image of being subservient to the government, to the regime. And then you have this very public gesture. Some people began comparing it with the way Catholic priests played a role in solidarity in Poland during the communist times. It was really new. It was a breath of fresh air.

I can't say I'm that surprised, because I know many, or quite a few, Russian Orthodox priests who are very like-minded, in terms of their outlook on life, their outlook on politics. They may not necessarily be public about it, but they are of very sound, normal if I may say so, political views.

I always tried to, when we speak to Western audiences, we always ask people to differentiate between Russia and the Putin regime, because they're two different things. And we ask people not to confuse them. In the same way, the church hierarchy of course, is loyal to Putin, but it doesn't mean all the churches. Those are different things as well.

But that was a trend. That was a sign of a trend. And of course, what you are describing now, Marc, is part of the counter reaction, obviously. And this is not something that's new. This is something that has been practiced back in Soviet days too. These actions, or actions like these, used to be referred to as active measures. This was an old KGB term, where they would use agents of influence, or channels of influence in Western countries, to try to achieve their goals.

One of the most prominent examples of this, of course the technology was different back in the day, but the substance was the same. Back in the seventies,

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

14 when the Nobel committee considered awarding the Peace Prize to Andrei Sakharov, the leading Soviet dissident, there were media stories planted in Western newspapers, through Soviet agents of influence, expressing indignation as to how can you even think about awarding a Nobel Peace Prize to the creator of weapons of mass destruction?

Because of course, in his former life, Sakharov had been a physicist, and he was one of the fathers of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. So technically speaking, yes, he had been one of those people who created that bomb. Of course, that was not why, in the 1970s, that Nobel committee considered the Peace Prize for him. It was because he was the most prominent, and the clearest voice against Soviet oppression.

And thankfully, those active measures were not successful and Sakharov did receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, which was a very important moral boost for many people in the dissident movement in the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately, unlike the Nobel committee in the 1970s, Amnesty International, in 2021, did fall under those active measures from the Kremlin propaganda. And as you may have heard recently, they officially withdrew the designation of Alexei Navalny as a person of cautions, over some remark he was supposed to make somewhere 20 years ago.

You just can't make this stuff up. But that's an example of active measures that are unfortunately successful. And the story, Marc, you're describing, I think that's just one of a long list of similar examples.

Marc Thiessen: Closing question from me is one, there was some reporting saying that this wasn't done by the Putin regime, this was done by his coach acting independently. Is that believable, that this wasn't coordinated in some way?

And second of all, just a closing question from us is, what can the United States be doing to help you? What should the Biden administration be doing now to support the Russian opposition?

Vladimir Kara-M...: Of course, I don't have any inside information on this, but I'm almost sure that, yes, every such decision, especially that involves foreign affairs, and that involves active measures in Western countries, I'm sure that goes on Putin's desk, personally. As does any other major decision.

Taking in a system of power, which they themselves are calling a vertical of power, that's their own term. Nothing in the system can be done, at least nothing important in the system can be done, without direct approval or authorization from the man at the top, in the Kremlin.

So, my instinct would certainly be to answer that in the affirmative.

Danielle Pletka: And how can we help?

Vladimir Kara-M...: One of the favorite lines by the Kremlin propaganda machine, is that people like

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

15 my colleagues and myself, Russian small D democrats, Russian opposition leaders, Russian opposition activists, that we supposedly go to and we ask the West for money, or for political support, or we ask the West to come in and effect regime change here in Russia, or some other nonsense of this kind that they keep peddling from their television screens.

Of course, none of that has anything to do with reality. It's only for Russians to change the situation in Russia. It's only Russians who can change Russia. It's only Russians who should change Russia. And I may add, it's only Russians who one day will change Russia. It cannot be done and should not be done any other way.

Vladimir Kara-M...: The only thing we do ask of our friends and colleagues in the West, above all in the United States of America, is to stop the enabling, and in effect, supporting Putin by continuing to allow his cronies and oligarchs to use Western banks, Western financial institutions, Western jurisdictions, as grounds, as safe havens to store the looted wealth that they're stealing from the people of Russia. Because that is what's been happening. The wheels that allow the Putin system to continue functioning, our oiled by this kleptocratic system that is, in turn, enabled by its access to the Western financial institutions.

You know, it's been said that the largest export from the Putin regime through the West is not oil or gas, it is corruption. And I think that statement is absolutely true, but of course that is a two-way street. And for someone to be able to export corruption, someone else somewhere needs to be willing to import it. And there has been no shortage of people or governments or countries or banks or financial institutions. And unfortunately, this does include the United States, who have been willing to, at the very least, turn a blind eye, or at worst to actually actively welcome those people and their dirty money into their systems. By various accounts, there was around $1,000,000,000,000 US dollars in private Russian assets held in Western jurisdictions outside of Russia, much of that wealth is linked to Vladimir Putin personally.

We saw a very small glimpse of that with the Panama Papers in 2016. You remember the $2 billion offshore account belonging to a cellist friend of Putin's. You know, we had a joke back here in Moscow at the time that we all assumed that Paul McCarthy was the richest musician in the world. Apparently, it's some guy from St. Petersburg nobody's ever heard of because he's one of Putin's wards. He's one of the people that are holding Putin's money because he's of course too clever to... I mean, there's no bank account that says, "Vladimir Putin," at least I don't think so. It's all being held with people whom he trusts. And it's all being held in Western banks. And Western governments are aware of this. I'm absolutely certain.

And so, to answer your question, the only thing we do want the US to do is to actually stay true to its own values, and to stop enabling and just stop being complicit in this corruption, in this export of kleptocracy from the Putin regime, and also to stay true to your values in terms of political integrity. Because in 2024, Vladimir Putin will end his current and final presidential mandate under the constitution, as it should stand.

As you know, last year, there was a sham plebiscite held under the cover of the

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

16 pandemic that in violation of all Russian laws and Russia's obligations under the OSCE, the organization for security and cooperation Europe, went through a series of couple of hundreds of constitutional amendments, the most important of which allowed Putin to wave presidential term limits and try to stay in power beyond 2024. Those amendments were enacted illegally. They were enacted illegitimately. This has now been reflected not only in several statements and speeches by leading Western political leaders, but also now, an official resolution by the European parliament that was passed overwhelmingly. I hope there is a similar measure taken up soon in the US Congress.

And I hope that when the spring of 2024 comes, the Western world, led by the United States, will take a clear position on non-recognition of any attempt by Putin to unlawfully usurp power, just as they did, for example, with Lukashenko, or previously with Hugo Chavez or with Fujimori in Peru, and many other cases where dictators tried to remain in power beyond the end of their terms, in violation of the term limit, because that is what Putin would be doing.

And finally, and very importantly for us, we always ask our Western colleagues, and again, above all, the United States, not to confuse Russia with the Putin regime, because that's what the Kremlin wants you to do. They're trying to pretend that they are Russia, as Vyacheslav Volodin, one of Putin's political lieutenants, has said publicly, "There is no Russia without Putin." That was a quote. I've never heard anything more insulting about my country.

And that is also not true because, as I think the whole world now has seen with these mass protests that we have in the last few months, there are so many people in Russia who have a very different vision for our country. As Alexei Navalny said recently before he was arrested, in one of his interviews, he was asked by the journalist to sort of outline the program of the opposition. You know, what will the opposition do if and when it comes to power? And I suppose the journalist was expecting a long list of specific policies and proposals, and Alexei responded with one single phrase. He said, "We want Russia to become a normal European country." Full stop. And to anyone who knows our history, there are so many different things in that one phrase. We do want Russia to become a normal European country. And I also have no doubt that that day will come. It's only for us here to work, to bring that day closer.

But what we do hope and what we expect from the United States of America is that it will stay true to its principles, that it will stay true to its values, that it will not enable the Putin regime in any way, financial or political. And that we can all look forward to that day when the United States of America and a free and democratic Russia can work together in partnership and cooperation, because we do actually have a lot of common interests that are hidden by this hideous agenda that the Putin regime has forced on everybody.

Danielle Pletka: Amen to that. We're proud to know you, and really, I know I speak for all of our colleagues at AEI, as well. We admire, not just your courage, we admire your courage, Alexei Navalny's courage, and all of the people who are putting their lives and their family's lives on the line for the values that you just talked about. Good for you.

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

17 So, Marc, what do you think?

Marc Thiessen: I was inspired. We did this on Skype, as you mentioned. And so, we were actually able to see him, and it was like having a conversation in a room with him, that this man was literally in prison the other day. And he's just willing to talk to us and he's completely unbowed. People like this are why I wanted to do what I do right now. Why I came to a place like AEI. Because we stand with the freedom fighters.

Danielle Pletka: We had Lech Walesa sitting in that seat that you're sitting in right now.

Marc Thiessen: That's exactly right. He's a modern-day Lech Walesa.

Danielle Pletka: And these are the people that change the world. And you know, we in Washington embrace the conceit that we are the center of the universe. But the reality is that in places like Russia, in places like Poland, in places like Syria, in places like Iraq, it's individuals who believe in something.

Marc Thiessen: I want to use this opportunity to make an important point, which is: people ask themselves, why do we care what happens in Russia? Why do we care what happens? How does the lack of freedom in Russia affect me here at home? And what we've learned in the last few years, starting in 9/11, through the pandemic, is the lack of freedom in faraway places affects us here at home in the most profound ways. The lack of freedom and the existence of oppression in Afghanistan is what led to the 9/11 attacks. We fought the Soviets by proxy and beat them in Afghanistan and then decided, "Well, what happens there doesn't matter to us anymore." And guess what? It came to haunt us with an attack on 9/11 on the Twin Towers and on the Pentagon, where I was.

And then what happens in China and the way the Chinese regime treats its people affects us right now because we have a podcast coming out next week with Dr. Marty Makary about how do we get out of this lockdown? We've had half a million Americans killed in the last year by a virus that only came here because, for almost two months, the Chinese regime lied about it. If they had addressed this early and allowed us to come in, we might've contained it. We might've contained the damage. We might've never had the lockdowns and all the economic and other damage that we had. That's a digression from Russia,

but the point is, freedom in Russia, freedom in China, freedom in Afghanistan, matters to us because we've lost half a million Americans. We lost 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and thousands more in battles afterwards to fight these terrorists. What happens in Moscow, what happens in Beijing, what happens in faraway places can really come home and affect the United States of America. And so, we should care about it because, it's important because it's right, but we should all care about it because it's in our self-interest to care.

Danielle Pletka: And I think the one natural conclusion from this is that we need a more intelligent foreign policy towards Russia because the reality is the United States has allowed Putin to get away with this. And that's not just Donald Trump. That's Joe Biden when he was vice-president, that's Barack Obama. And before, it was George W. Bush, who really didn't see Putin for who he was and Russia for where it was

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

18 heading. And again, you can say, "Oh, we need to stop interfering overseas." With some judiciously applied sanctions, with some judicious support for human freedom, for economic freedom, for political and religious freedom, we can actually affect these changes. And one thing I think is very clear in 2021, we have not had a serious Russia policy in a very long time.

The fact that someone like Vladimir can get poisoned and the FBI doesn't want to tell him who did it.

Marc Thiessen: Oh my gosh.

Danielle Pletka: What the hell was that? The fact that Vladimir Putin can have more than a hundred billion dollars in assets overseas and the countries of the world have let him get away with it. These are not hard things. And those are just the tips of the iceberg. Syria, what's happened in Syria? What's happened in Georgia? What's happened in Ukraine? What's happened in Europe? We all need to have a much more serious Russia policy than we have heretofore. I know you want to talk a little bit about this...

Marc Thiessen: What happened in the NHL.

Danielle Pletka: And you know, but I mean, look, yeah, you can say, "I don't care because it doesn't affect me," but this is how the long arm of tyranny can reach into your Sunday afternoon enjoyment and take somebody who was otherwise an up-and- coming hockey player and destroy his life.

Marc Thiessen: Here's what bothers me about it. It's one thing when Vladimir Putin oppresses people in his own country, and that's unacceptable, and we stand with people like Vladimir Kara-Murza, to push back on that. But it's the fact that he can reach into the United States

Danielle Pletka: With impunity.

Marc Thiessen: With impunity, and take a Russian hockey player who has the temerity to say that "Putin needs to go, and I stand with Navalny," and exercise his first amendment rights in the United States of America and launched this attack on his character that literally takes him off the ice. And by the way, where was Alex Ovechkin and all the Russians in the NHL who are Putin acolytes? Why weren't they standing with Panarin when he stood with Navalny? Nothing. Panarin's back on the ice. Hopefully, we don't know a lot about what happened, but hopefully he's taken care of his family and whatever he needed to do in the time off. But it just bothers the hell out of me that this regime can exercise these kinds of active measures in my country and take a guy who's come here and is exercising the freedoms that we all believe in, in our borders, and impose costs on him in that way. It's just unacceptable.

Danielle Pletka: It is unacceptable.

Marc Thiessen: And the message is: "Russians, if you're abroad, we can reach you there. Your family's back home, don't speak out. Don't you dare cross our regime."

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

19 Danielle Pletka: Well, we didn't even talk about what happened in Salisbury in the UK, and the attempted murder of these Russian dissidents in England. But even that, I would argue, has not been too much for the Europeans who have to be persuaded every time to impose additional sanctions. And if you want any last details about this, go back and listen to the podcast I mentioned with Jonathan Swan, where we talk about how the Germans are arguing for and facilitating a Russian stranglehold on European energy supplies. Yeah. This is one of those no good- news stories. And people like Vladimir really deserve our support.

Marc Thiessen: And they deserve for the Biden administration to now release what the FBI knows about the attack on Vladimir Kara-Murza.

Danielle Pletka: I agree entirely. Folks, thanks for listening. As always compliments to me, complaints to Marc.

Marc Thiessen: How about, let's have all the compliments go to Vladimir Kara-Murza today?

Danielle Pletka: I couldn't agree more. And still text stuff to Alexa. Subscribe, tell your friends, give us reviews. And thanks for listening.

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org