«Ο Trump επηρεάζεται από την κολακεία του Putin» - Kara-Murza, Ρώσος ακτιβιστής της αντιπολίτευσης - video Dailymotion

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«Ο Trump επηρεάζεται από την κολακεία του Putin» - Kara-Murza, Ρώσος ακτιβιστής της αντιπολίτευσης  Ο Ρώσος ακτιβιστής της αντιπολίτευσης και πρώην πολιτικός κρατούμενος Vladimir Kara-Murza λέει ότι η αντιμετώπιση του Putin από τους δυτικούς ηγέτες στο παρελθόν ήταν «σοκαριστική και ντροπιαστική» και έδωσε στον Putin περιθώριο και υπονόμευσε τη δημοκρατία στη Ρωσία.  ΔΙΑΒΑΣΤΕ ΕΠΙΣΗΣ : http://gr.euronews.com/2025/07/31/o-trump-ephreazetai-apo-thn-kolakeia-toy-putin-kara-murza-rwsos-aktibisths-ths-antipol  Γίνε συνδρομητής! ! Το euronews είναι διαθέσιμο σε 12 γλώσσες

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00:00Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE

00:30Vladimir Karamurza, Russian opposition politician, former political prisoner.

00:34Thank you very much for joining us on the Europe Conversation.

00:36Thank you so much for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here.

00:38Now, I'm sure so many people have said this to you, but obviously you should not be here.

00:42You were poisoned in 2015 and 2017. You had a 5% chance of living.

00:46You were told you were in a coma for a month.

00:49And then, just a couple of years ago, you were sentenced to 25 years in prison in Siberia.

00:53And you managed to be released as part of a deal with former U.S. President Joe Biden.

00:59Tell us, first of all, about that.

01:01You know, the first time you got poisoned, what exactly happened?

01:05How did they do it? How did you realise what was happening?

01:07Well, I'd been involved in Russian opposition politics for many years.

01:10I came to work with Boris Nemtsov, who was the most prominent leader of the Russian Democratic opposition,

01:15former deputy prime minister, who was assassinated in front of the Kremlin, literally, 10 years ago, in 2015.

01:19I came to work with him back in 1999, and I was myself a candidate for the Russian parliament back in 2003,

01:26when it was still possible for opposition candidates to be on the ballot, because it was unimaginable.

01:29And for many years, Boris Nemtsov and I were involved in the international advocacy campaign for the passage of Magnetsky Act,

01:36so the laws that would introduce targeted personal sanctions in a form of visa bans and asset freezes

01:41against officials of the Putin regime and of any other dictatorial regime around the world

01:45who are personally complicit in human rights abuses and corruption.

01:50And as you can imagine, that's not a very popular thing in the Kremlin,

01:53because these people, the people around Putin, have long been used to the idea of stealing in Russia.

01:59And I was first poisoned in May of 2015.

02:03I had no doubt from the beginning that it was the Russian security service,

02:06but now we know, thanks to an international media investigation led by Bellingcat,

02:10that have identified actually the people, not just the unit, but the specific people, officers in the Russian FSB,

02:16whose task it is to physically liquidate political opponents of Vladimir Putin.

02:20This was May 2015. I was at a meeting with my colleagues in Moscow,

02:23and suddenly I felt that I had difficulty breathing.

02:26And then I felt like I couldn't breathe at all, and I started to sweat.

02:31My heart began to beat really, really fast.

02:34And before I knew it, I was unconscious.

02:36It's a very scary feeling to feel that you're dying.

02:39This is what I felt like. I felt that this is the end.

02:41And then I was brought to a hospital, and doctors told my wife that I had about a 5% chance to live.

02:45I was in an artificial life support with a multiple organ failure, in a coma,

02:51and the official diagnosis that was given to me at my Moscow hospital

02:55was toxic action by an unidentified substance,

02:59which translated from medical speak to normal human language means poisoning.

03:02I did survive. The doctors saved my life.

03:05And then I had to basically spend a year to learn to walk again, to learn to use a spoon again.

03:11I mean, everything was just gone.

03:12And then as soon as I was able to, I went back to Russia and it was in my work,

03:15but then it happened again in February 2017.

03:16The exact same thing. Same diagnosis, same conditions.

03:19And now, thanks to that amazing Bellingcat investigation,

03:22we know of the existence of this special unit within the Russian FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service.

03:28And so this is the reality of today's Russia,

03:33that there is a special government unit whose job it is to physically eliminate,

03:37to murder political opponents of Vladimir Putin.

03:39You were outspoken against the corruption and the sort of sanctimony and so on within Russia.

03:45And that trajectory has left us to a place where it's impossible to have an opposition politician,

03:50people being poisoned, falling out, being thrown out of windows,

03:54assassinated on foreign soil and so on.

03:57I mean, how did it get to that point?

03:59Was it that the international community ignored Putin?

04:02Well, it was shocking and shameful, frankly,

04:04the way many Western leaders behaved when Putin came to power.

04:07You know, there's this myth that is often propagated nowadays by people both inside,

04:11but also outside of Russia, very often for reasons of self-justification.

04:15And the myth is that there was some kind of an early Putin who was supposedly okay,

04:19you know, who believed in reform or modernization and cooperation with the West.

04:22And then something went horribly wrong along the way,

04:25and now it's this Putin who's doing all these things.

04:27Nothing could be further from the truth.

04:29Putin was Putin from the very beginning.

04:31In fact, I remember very well the day I understood exactly who that man was

04:35and what direction he would take our country.

04:37On the 20th of December, 1999, this was before he became president.

04:40He was still prime minister.

04:42He came to Lubyanka Square in Moscow at the former KGB, now FSB headquarters,

04:46to officially unveil a memorial plaque to Yuri Andropov,

04:50a longtime former Soviet KGB chief,

04:53who was one of the people instrumental in the 1956 invasion of Hungary,

04:56who was somebody who prioritized the suppression of domestic dissent when he was chairman of the KGB,

05:03somebody who embodied everything that was wrong with the communist system.

05:06And it is to this man that Vladimir Putin chose to unveil a memorial plaque.

05:11In Russia, symbols are important.

05:12In Russia, symbols matter.

05:13And I had no more questions.

05:15He could not have chosen a more potent symbol to signal the direction of his future rule.

05:19And just in case anybody still had questions,

05:22in the first year of his presidency,

05:24Mr. Putin reinstated the Stalin-era Soviet national anthem

05:27as the national anthem of the Russian Federation.

05:29What do you think when you heard the likes of U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff praise Vladimir Putin

05:35and say, oh, he prayed for Donald Trump when he got shot at during one of his rallies

05:41and that he's actually a good guy?

05:44Look, Vladimir Putin, of course, is a former KGB officer.

05:46And as he once himself publicly admitted,

05:48the favorite part of his job was recruiting people.

05:51And to be a successful recruiter,

05:53you need to know what your interlocutor,

05:55sort of what kind of person he or she is,

05:57and you need to sort of get in their trust.

06:00And that's exactly what he used when he came to power.

06:03George W. Bush was a devout Christian, is a devout Christian.

06:06And so when Putin met with him,

06:07he told him the story about a cross that his mother had given him

06:10that, you know, survived in this massive fire at his dacha and whatever else.

06:15And that's when President Bush came out and said he looked into his eyes and saw his soul.

06:19And, you know, I think he rightly calculated, Putin did,

06:22that the best way to do this with Donald Trump is through personal flattery.

06:27And that's exactly what he did with that conversation about praying for him

06:30and also, of course, giving him a painting

06:34that Mr. Witkoff brought to Washington.

06:38I mean, look, these are tricks that have been used by Soviet,

06:42and not just Soviet security services, for decades.

06:45It's incomprehensible to me how serious people can fall for this kind of stuff in the 21st century.

06:51So let's look at the opposition,

06:52because I know for a long time you are very optimistic about the future of Russia.

06:55I still am.

06:57Yeah, that's the thing.

06:58Because it doesn't look like there's any hope for optimism.

07:01Putin is alive and well, because I remember for a long time

07:03people kind of thought that he might have cancer and so on.

07:06There doesn't look like there's any chance of him being overthrown.

07:10Prigozhin sort of tried that and failed.

07:13I'm not just a politician, I'm also a historian by my education.

07:15And the one thing we know very clearly from the history of Russia

07:18is that all major political change in our country happens like this.

07:22Right.

07:23Swiftly, suddenly, and completely unexpectedly.

07:25Both the Tsarist regime at the beginning of the 20th century

07:28and the Communist regime at the end of the 20th century went down in three days.

07:32Literally, not a metaphor.

07:34This is how things happen in Russia.

07:35None of us knows when or how change will come.

07:38What we do know is that nothing is forever.

07:41and everything that had a beginning will have an end.

07:44And every dictatorship in the history of the world has fallen.

07:46Do you have any ideas that there may be anyone within the regime

07:50that would be willing to overthrow Putin?

07:54What I do know for sure is that there are many people in Russia,

07:57inside Russia today, who completely disagree with this regime,

08:00who categorically oppose this war of aggression.

08:03And, you know, when I was in prison,

08:04I would receive thousands of letters from all over the country every month

08:07from people I'd never met, from towns and cities I've never been to,

08:09some of them I hadn't even heard of.

08:11And these were the people who took the time and the risk, by the way,

08:14to write to somebody like me, you know, an enemy of the people,

08:16using the official prison correspondence system.

08:18Those letters get through to you.

08:19Some did, some didn't, but many did,

08:20because they have to go through prison censorship.

08:22And, of course, you need to leave all your contact details and so on.

08:25And people wrote to say that they think like I do.

08:29They think the same of this war as I do.

08:31And you will remember last year, in 2024,

08:34we had a so-called presidential election in Russia,

08:37with, you know, a circus with Putin

08:38and a couple of pre-approved clowns running alongside him on the ballot.

08:41And then suddenly there was this guy, this candidate,

08:44a former member of parliament and a lawyer by the name of Boris Nadezhdin,

08:48who announced that he would run as the anti-war presidential candidate,

08:52saying he's against the war in Ukraine and he would end it on day one.

08:54And the public response was just unimaginable.

08:57Suddenly, all over Russia, in large cities and small towns,

09:01you would see hours-long queues of people standing at his campaign offices

09:06to sign the ballot nominating petitions,

09:09because you need to get a certain number of signatures to be registered as a candidate.

09:12And this was happening all over the country.

09:14And, you know, I would see, in the letters,

09:16people would send me the photographs from those long lines.

09:20and people were saying how important it was for them.

09:22They gave you hope.

09:23Absolutely, because, you know, the Putin propaganda tries to convince everybody,

09:26both in Russia and in the West,

09:28that, you know, the Russian society is this monolith,

09:30that everybody supports Putin, everybody backs the war.

09:32Of course, he was not allowed on the ballot, as usually happens in Russia.

09:36But that was besides the point,

09:37because suddenly people saw that there were people like me,

09:39that they were not alone.

09:40Just a final question, because, you know, you're obviously a historian as well.

09:42What was it like to hear you were being sent to prison in Siberia?

09:45Because we hear of Siberia from the Cold War, from the Soviet Union,

09:51even the image of it straight away.

09:53It's just cruelty, inhumanity, death.

09:56What was it like when you heard that?

09:58And what was it like being in prison in Siberia?

09:59I mean, obviously, you thought you were never coming out.

10:01You were given 25 years.

10:02Yes, I was certain I was going to die there.

10:04And that exchange that took place last year was a miracle.

10:06This is the only way I can describe it.

10:08But as a historian, of course, I've read and reread in prison

10:13and many memoirs by Soviet dissidents,

10:16literature on the Stalin period, of course, Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov.

10:20And, of course, books going even further back in the 19th century.

10:24The city where I was in prison, for example, Omsk,

10:27a large city in western Siberia.

10:29This is where some of the Decembrists were in prison

10:31back in the early 19th century.

10:32This was where Dostoevsky was in prison.

10:34So his letters from the House of the Dead

10:36was written on his experience in prison in Omsk.

10:39And then, of course, in the 20th century,

10:40Solzhenitsyn was in that transit prison in Omsk and so on.

10:42And what was really astonishing to me

10:44is that how everything down to the last details

10:47is still exactly the same as it was in communist times.

10:50For example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in the first circle,

10:53he describes at the very end the route

10:54that the prisoners were taken from Moscow to Siberia by.

10:58And they went through the Kuybyshev transit prison.

11:01Kuybyshev today is called Samara, back to its original name.

11:03That was exactly the route I was taken by the Stalipin carriages,

11:07which is the Russian prisoner train transports,

11:09which, again, haven't changed in a century.

11:12And so, you know, there's this saying

11:13that every historian subconsciously wishes

11:16to personally experience the subject of his study.

11:18I guess be careful what you wish for, if that is true.

11:20That's what we're going through your head as well, I'm sure,

11:22at the same time.

11:23As well as that you're doomed,

11:24but also this is how I imagined it.

11:27But also we know how it ends.

11:29We know that none of these regimes continued.

11:32We know that all of these regimes fell.

11:33The Tsarist regime fell.

11:34The Communist regime fell.

11:36And this one, the Putin regime, will fall

11:37absolutely any time.

11:39This is the point about Russia.

11:41We don't know.

11:41It might be in five years.

11:42It might be in three months.

11:44Lenin, in his famous speech in Zurich in January 1917,

11:47said that we old folks will not live to see this coming revolution.

11:49The revolution happened in six weeks.

11:51Brilliant.

11:51Vladimir Karamuzha, thank you very much

11:52for joining us on the Europe Conversation.

11:54Thank you so much for inviting me.

11:55Thank you so much for joining us on the Europe Conversation.

11:59Thank you.

12:00Thank you.

«Ο Trump επηρεάζεται από την κολακεία του Putin» - Kara-Murza, Ρώσος ακτιβιστής της αντιπολίτευσης

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