Father says Kara-Murza diagnosed with kidney failure after being admitted to hospital in Moscow on Tuesday evening

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

A Russian opposition activist has been taken to hospital in Moscow after a sudden illness.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, who works for the Open Russia movement founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch and Putin critic who now lives in Zurich, was admitted after a sharp drop in blood pressure and loss of consciousness.

Doctors initially thought he could have been poisoned, Vadim Prokhorov, a lawyer for the RPR Parnas opposition party, told the newspaper Kommersant. Kara-Murza is a member of the political council of the party, which had been led by Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov until his death in February.

Doctors later diagnosed Kara-Murza with kidney failure, his father told RBC newspaper. “The deputy head doctor of the hospital came out and told us that everything was fine with his heart, his lungs, his stomach, etc. It all had to do with his kidneys,” he said. “It could have been spoiled yogurt or something else.”



Although Kara-Murza’s father ruled out deliberate poisoning, colleagues had expressed doubts about the sudden illness, which comes after the killing of Nemtsov and reported pressure on opposition activists.

Open Russia project coordinator Maria Baronova told the Guardian his illness was suspicious and said “various activities surrounding public people from Open Russia look strange”, but declined to elaborate.



Opposition journalist Alexander Ryklin wrote on Facebook on Wednesday that he had just spoken with Kara-Murza and that the doctors “suspect poisoning”.

Kara-Murza’s father previously told Kommersant that his son’s condition could be explained by an allergy or a high-stress lifestyle “with irregular meals, little sleep”.

Kara-Murza had been at the offices of the Russian Legal Information Agency, a state-owned legal news agency, on Tuesday when he fell ill and was taken away by ambulance, his father said.

Anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, who was given two suspended sentences on what many see as politically motivated charges, said on Twitter that he had seen Kara-Murza a few days ago, adding: “He didn’t complain about his health and was entirely energetic [like usual].”

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Russian police raided the Open Russia offices in April. According to a copy of their search warrant later, police suspected the organisation of printing leaflets to be handed out at a planned opposition rally that called for “extremist activities”.

Two days ago there was a screening in Moscow of a 26-minute film Open Russia film, entitled Family. It alleges that Chechnya’s president Ramzan Kadyrov is guilty of widespread human rights abuses, presides over a personal army of 80,000 fighters and skims off money from the federal budget.

Kara-Murza was also involved in writing a report into the war in Ukraine, conceived by Nemtsov, who was shot dead outside the Kremlin in February. At the time of his death, Nemtsov was planning a dossier exposing Vladimir Putin’s secret war in the east of Ukraine. The 65-page report entitled Putin and the War was completed by Nemtsov’s friends. It alleges that Russian troops have taken part in the conflict – with at least 220 killed – and that Russia has covertly supplied the rebels with military hardware, intelligence and training. Putin denies Russian forces have been involved in the war.



Kara-Murza lives in Moscow and New York, where his three children are based. His previous projects have included a documentary likening Russia’s opposition to Putin with Soviet dissidents who protested in the 1960s. Kara-Murza took Vladimir Bukovsky, a prominent enemy of the KGB who spent 12 years in Soviet labour camps and psychiatric facilities, to New York last year.