Lawmakers demand Vladimir Kara-Murza’s release

The legacy of John McCain was on full view in the halls of Congress this week, where a bipartisan group of lawmakers repeatedly invoked his legacy to demand that Russia release a journalist detained for criticizing Vladimir Putin.

One year ago, Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian political dissident and journalist, was arrested by Putin’s regime on trumped-up charges of spreading false information about Russia’s military during a speech he gave in McCain’s home state of Arizona. To commemorate his detention, and to call for his release, the McCain Institute hosted an event in the nation’s capital where lawmakers from both parties — who served jointly with McCain for almost 100 years between them — rallied to Kara-Murza’s defense. 

This week, Putin’s regime leveled a twenty-five-year prison sentence for treason on Kara-Murza, who is already ill due to repeated poisoning attempts on his life. Speakers at the McCain Institute’s event frequently compared the divergent paths taken by Putin and Kara-Murza to argue that there is a path for a free Russia, and that Kara-Murza’s heroic decision to return home and face certain arrest laid the groundwork. The lawmakers and activists laid out their hopes and plans to force Putin to free Kara-Murza.

Senator Lindsey Graham laid out a multi-pronged legislative agenda: “To make Vladimir Kara-Murza’s sacrifice meaningful, we should do two things: we should designate this as an unlawful detention under US law, and we should go ahead and label Putin’s Russia a state sponsor of terrorism.” Graham added that “Putin is a terrorist, he’s a war criminal, there’s an arrest warrant out for him.”

Both of Graham’s plans have broad, bipartisan support in Congress — but he told The Spectator that the Biden administration is dragging its heels on both. He said “the State Department needs to act” on the unlawful detention designation. “The application for that designation has been sitting over there for months.” 

When it comes to labeling Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, he said that “the administration has been dragging their feet. They have been resistant to labeling Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. They’re making a huge mistake, because China, if they go all in to help Putin, I want to make it harder for them to do that… the mistakes we made before the invasion do not need to be repeated again.”

Russia’s escalation of jailing journalists such as Kara-Murza and the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich, who was just arrested by Russia on espionage charges, jibes with its uptick in high-profile arrests of other Americans, such as WNBA player Brittney Griner — who was jailed for marijuana possession and subsequently freed in a prisoner swap with a Russian arms dealer known as the “merchant of death.” Putin foes like Graham fault the Biden administration for deals like the Griner-Viktor Bout swap. “It didn’t help one bit,” he told The Spectator.

Graham isn’t alone in expecting bipartisan legislation to move in Congress that will condemn Putin. Representative Don Bacon, one of Putin’s fiercest critics in Congress, just rolled out a bipartisan measure condemning Putin for kidnapping thousands of Ukrainian children. “Putin’s regime has kidnapped over 16,000 Ukrainian children,” Bacon told The Spectator.

“These same crimes against humanity have been done by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Pinochet. Putin now finds his face with these five on this modern Mount Rushmore of the most evil of humanity.”