Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Krishnan Girimurthy and this is the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives and the events that have helped shape them.

My guest this week would never normally have intended to be here, but she is here campaigning for the release of her husband, Vladimir Karamazah, who is a politician really, who is now in jail in Russia,

having spoken out against the war in Ukraine and against many other decisions by Vladimir Putin. He was a guest on Channel 4 News at the beginning of the war.

I interviewed him when I was in Ukraine just before he went to Russia from America where he was staying and shortly afterwards he was arrested.

You have Gennia Karamazah, welcome, thank you very much for coming.

Hello Krishnan, thank you very much for having me here.

What is the latest with Vladimir's case first?

Vladimir is still kept at Moscow's 5th pre-trial detention centre where he awaits a bill.

I think that we all know what the outcome of this bill will be and after that he will be transferred to a strict regime prison colony

where he will be serving his 25-year prison sentence for high treason among other things based on five public speeches that he made on different international platforms denouncing the war of aggression against Ukraine,

speaking about political repression in Russia and they ever grow in lists of political prisoners in the Russian Federation, speaking about total censorship of the media,

and the illegitimate character of the Putin regime after the 2020 so-called referendum that basically destroyed the country's constitution and made Vladimir Putin a czar forever.

And even before the war began, he had been a long-standing campaigner activist involved in supporting the Magnitsky sanctions against Russia and political opposition in general.

Hence such a harsh treatment, Vladimir has been in the opposition to Vladimir Putin since Vladimir Putin came to power over 23 years ago.

And over all these years, he's been a very principled, loud and fierce critic of the Putin regime.

As you rightly pointed out, he was involved and still is in the advocacy for the introduction of the Magnitsky legislation around the world.

He joined this campaign together with his friend and mentor Boris Nemtsov in 2010.

And for the first few years, they worked together closely with Bill Browder promoting the adoption of such sanctions around the world.

But in 2015, Boris Nemtsov was assassinated on the Bolshevetsky Bridge in Moscow, and three months after that, my husband was poisoned for the first time.

It happened in Moscow. The poisoning plunged him into a coma. He suffered a multiple organ failure.

He was lucky enough to survive even though the doctors gave him a 5% chance of survival.

He was lucky to survive thanks to the efforts of the medical team. And I do believe thanks to his absolutely amazing inner strength.

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