Kyiv, Ukraine – Vladimir Kara-Murza barely survived two suspicious poisonings in 2015 and 2017 which, according to him, had been orchestrated by the Kremlin.
The 43 -year -old bearded and bald player may not be as frank as the opposition chief Alexey Navalny, who almost died of poisoning similar to the nervous agent in 2020.
But Kara-Murza, a historian educated by Cambridge, helped convince Western governments to slap personal sanctions on dozens of Russian officials.
In 2023, a Moscow court sentenced him to 25 years in prison for “betrayal” and, behind bars, he won a Pulitzer prize for his columns for the Washington Post.
Released last year as part of an exchange of prisoners, Kara-Murza settled in Germany and continued his work of plea against the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the War of Moscow in Ukraine.
But last week, Kara-Murza’s remarks on ethnic identity and alleged blood of Russian activists shaken up a lot on both sides of the hottest armed conflict in Europe.
“It turns out that [ethnic] The Russians find psychologically difficult to kill the Ukrainians, “said Kara-Murza in the French Senate Thursday while explaining why the Deputy Department of Russia Enrône Ethnic Minorities.
“Because [ethnic Russians and Ukrainians] Are the same, we are similar people, we have an almost similar language, the same religion, hundreds and hundreds of years of common history, “said Kara-Murza.
The Russians and the Ukrainians are ethnic Slavs whose state dates back to Kyinan Rus, the largest medieval oriental European state torn by the Mongols, the Poles and the Lithuanians.
“But for someone who belongs to another culture, it would be easier to kill Ukrainians,” added Kara-Murza.
His remarks have made observers and defenders of Aboriginal rights, targeting and smoking.
A former Russian diplomat said that “measuring the degree of cruelty by their ethnicity is a dead end”.
The Kremlin does not “recruit specifically the minorities, they recruit people in the poorest regions, and it is, as a rule, ethnic autonomies”, Boris Bondarev, who left his post as ministry of the foreign case to protest against the invasion of Russia in 2022 from Ukraine, in Al Jazeera.
“Only a dull man could say that in the fourth year of war in a multi -thnical society,” said Aboriginal peoples activist Dmitry Berezhkov, of the Itelmen nation on the Pacific Pacific Peninsula in Kamchatka.
The Russian liberal opposition figures, mainly Urbanites in the middle class, “drowse as soon as they walk on thin ice” ethnic minority problems, he added.
Ethnic Russians constitute more than two -thirds of the Russian population of 143 million inhabitants. The others are minorities – millions of ethnic Ukrainians and Tatars to small native groups in Siberia and the Arctic which have regional autonomy, although mainly nominal.
Even in regions rich in hydrocarbons, rare or diamonds, minorities live in rural areas, often inhospitable, coexisting and mixing with ethnic Russians.
They all count on television networks funded by the Kremlin more than urban inhabitants, often do not have internet access and see the registration bonuses and the wages of the military who fight in Ukraine as a post of disastrous poverty in their families.
Recruits receive up to $ 50,000 when registering and earn several thousand dollars a month – a fortune for anyone from these regions, regardless of their ethnic history.
“It’s colossal money for them, they will never earn it in their lives, whether they are Buryat or Russian,” said Bondarev.
In response to a criticism, Kara-Murza wrote on Facebook on Monday that the accusations were only “lies, manipulations and slander”.
In Berezhkov, the comment tackled the image of Kara-Murza more.
“In the past, [Kara-Murza’s words] Could be considered an error-but now they are his position, “he said.
Another defender of minority rights, Kara-Murza’s diatribe looked like a “signal for future voters” in the post-war russia to which the exile Kremlin critics hope to come back.
Oyumaa Dongak, who fled Tyva, a Turkish language province that borders China, thinks that Kara-Murza and other exiled Russian opposition leaders “are in competition” with Putin.
“It is not him, it is we who defends [ethnic] The Russians, ”she told Al Jazeera.
In 2024, Kara-Murza said Western sanctions imposed in Moscow after the 2022 invasion were “unjust and counterproductive” and injured the Russians as a whole. He wanted the West to raise wider sanctions and rather target individual civil servants.
A Ukrainian observer said Kara-Murza did not want ethnic Russians who can potentially vote for exile opposition leaders now feel collective guilt for atrocities committed in Ukraine.
“People are not feeling guilty. If you clubs on the head with moral condemnation every day, people will not admit their guilt but will hate anyone clubs,” the analyst based in kyiv, Vyacheslav Likhachyov told Al Jazeera.
“This is why stories about the atrocities of Chechen executioners and Buryat rapists are and will be popular,” he said.
The fighters deployed by the Chef-Kremlin chief of Chechnée, Ramzan Kadyrov, were nicknamed a “Tiktok army” for videos staged from them “taking” the Ukrainian bastions.
Their real role in the war is mainly reduced to the custody of the occupied, terrifying and tortured areas of the Ethnic Russian soldiers who refuse to fight.
But the Buryats, Aboriginal Buddhist from a barely populated and impoverished region near Mongolia, became notorious in Ukraine in 2022.
Defense groups of human rights and Ukrainian officials have identified personal details on certain Buryat soldiers who tortured, raped and killed civilians in Bucha and other cities north of kyiv.
But as ethnic Buryats are difficult to distinguish from other minority soldiers with distinctly Asian characteristics, Ukrainians often call them “Buryats”, said a community activist.
“All the natives of the Caucasus are considered as Chechens, and all Asians are considered as Buryats,” Aleksandra Garmazhapova told Al Jazeera, who helps men in Buryat escape mobilization and flee abroad.
However, the overwhelming majority of soldiers who have committed alleged war crimes in Bucha would have been ethnic Russians.
Garmazhapova survived because the Ukrainian forces began to bomb the Russian positions, and his captors fled to a basement.
“The Slavs, the Slavs, they were all Slavs,” said Viktor, a Bucha resident who was sprayed with fuel by Russian soldiers who put bets on the way to the path once they set it on fire in Al Jazeera in 2022, just days after his ordeal.
