Twice seriously poisoned in Russia, Vladimir Kara-Murza, an opposition leader and Post contributor, had good reason to believe a crime was committed against him. A subsequent probe by Bellingcat, an open-source investigative outfit, and two news organization partners showed that Mr. Kara-Murza was tailed frequently by officers from the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, before the poisonings in 2015 and 2017. Mr. Kara-Murza demanded that Russian authorities investigate. What he got was a runaround, and worse.
On Feb. 18, 2021, Mr. Kara-Murza laid out the case that he was targeted for assassination in a “statement of crime” sent to Alexander Bastrykin, then chairman of the Investigative Committee, a sort of super-prosecutor for the Russian Federation. Mr. Kara-Murza described the harrowing circumstances of the poisonings, which nearly killed him. The precise nature of the toxic substance used in the poisonings hasn’t been determined. Still, Mr. Kara-Murza insisted that justice be done. “I believe that the attempt to murder me by poisoning was caused by my political, ideological and social activities and was aimed at its suppression,” he said. The first poisoning came less than three months after a colleague in the opposition, Boris Nemtsov, was gunned down on a bridge outside the Kremlin walls. Like Mr. Kara-Murza, Mr. Nemtsov had also been tailed by the FSB for months. The person who ordered his murder has never been identified or apprehended.
Mr. Kara-Murza’s demand for an investigation was met with silence. As far as he could tell, Mr. Bastrykin took no action. On March 18, Mr. Kara-Murza took another step. He filed a complaint in the Basmanny district court in Moscow asking that it force Mr. Bastrykin to supply a copy of whatever decision he made in response to Mr. Kara-Murza’s statement of crime, and to deem it unlawful to sit there and do nothing.
The complaint came just weeks after the invasion of Ukraine and the imposition of a draconian law criminalizing any criticism of the Russian military. Mr. Kara-Murza refused to be silenced and spoke out against President Vladimir Putin, the war and the murder of Mr. Nemtsov, telling CNN that the Putin regime is “not just corrupt, it’s not just kleptocratic, it’s not just authoritarian, it is a regime of murderers.” He was soon arrested on spurious charges and remains unjustly imprisoned.
On Wednesday, Judge Yevgenia Nikolaeva of the Basmanny district court in Moscow threw out Mr. Kara-Murza’s complaint, saying in a written decision that Mr. Bastrykin had sent the original statement to a lower-level office for review, and that the office had not made any decision. Mr. Kara-Murza had “no basis” to complain his rights were violated, she wrote.
Mr. Kara-Murza ran into the brick wall of Mr. Putin’s regime. But Judge Nikolaeva did offer a revealing hint in a courtroom remark. “You should also ask Putin,” she said of his legal demands. True, Mr. Kara-Murza is Mr. Putin’s political prisoner, and in this dictatorship, all decisions flow from the top. Judge Nikolaeva certainly knows that much.