Russia’s opposition talking with Ukraine behind the scenes, top dissident says

Russia’s exiled opposition is quietly talking with Ukrainian officials, Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Russian-British journalist who is a leading Kremlin critic, told POLITICO on Thursday.

While both Ukraine and Russia’s opposition movement are fierce opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin, they have largely avoided working together. Kyiv has been wary of the movement, fearing it still holds imperial views on Ukraine and the Kremlin’s invasion, including the 2014 annexation of Crimea.

But Kara-Murza, a former political prisoner who was freed from a Siberian jail in a prisoner swap last year, told POLITICO that a dialogue was now happening behind the scenes. The discussions with Ukrainian officials were not “public,” he said.

“We would like to take it to the highest level,” he added, in a seeming reference to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Kara-Murza made the remarks after addressing members of the European Parliament in Brussels on Thursday together with Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of former Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison last year. Navalny’s team claims he was murdered on Putin’s orders.

Ilya Yashin, another Russian opposition politician who took part in Thursday’s discussion in Brussels, said the EU could mediate between Russia’s democratic movement and Ukraine’s government.

“We want to start this dialogue with Ukraine,” Yashin said, claiming that Zelenskyy had expressed openness to talking with them. “We are not enemies to Ukraine … and want to sustain its independence,” Yashin added.

POLITICO has contacted the Ukrainian foreign ministry for comment.

Splits between Ukrainians and the Russian opposition fall largely along the lines of responsibility toward the war. Many in Ukraine hold the Russian people responsible for Moscow’s aggression, while dissidents have been trying to push that it is Putin’s war, with average Russians as much victims as Ukrainians.

Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska reportedly declined an invitation to former U.S. President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last year rather than sit next to Navalnaya, who was also invited and declined, according to the Washington Post.

Kara-Murza was also embroiled in a scandal in April when, at a hearing at the French Senate, he claimed it is easier for non-Russian soldiers to kill Ukrainians because of the difference in culture and language.

His comments that “we are the same … almost the same language, the same religion, centuries and centuries of common history,” was met with anger from Ukrainians and those of former Soviet Union countries, accusing him of racism and imperialism.

Later, Kara-Murza claimed his words were used out of context, clarifying that he was reflecting on a conversation with a colleague.