Imprisoned Russian Journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza: Why Putin Really Targeted Ukraine
Imprisoned Russian writer, filmmaker, democracy activist and co-founder of the Russian Anti-War Committee Vladimir Kara-Murza was recently awarded the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize for his "outstanding civil society action in defence of human rights". A Senior Fellow of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, Kara-Murza has survived two poisoning attempts widely believed to have been orchestrated by the Putin regime, and is currently facing a lengthy jail sentence for his outspoken opposition to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. In this 2017 interview, he shared his insights on why Putin first decided to invade Crimea in 2014. Kara-Murza says, It "was not geopolitics. It was not spheres of influence. It was purely and primarily domestic. [Putin] could not allow a successful democratic European experiment to occur in a country that was so close to Russia."
This interview was recorded in 2017.