Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is serving a 25-year prison sentence for treason, has been transferred to a prison hospital, his wife Evgenia said in an online post.
Kara-Murza, 42, who was born in Moscow and holds both Russian and British passports, was jailed after repeatedly condemning Russia’s war in Ukraine and calling for foreign sanctions against his country.
His wife said he was transferred to the prison hospital in Omsk where he is being held on Thursday evening, but gave no further details on his condition.
She said his lawyers waited five hours to see him but were denied visitation rights.
Kara-Murza suffers from a nerve disease called polyneuropathy after surviving two poisoning attempts and has repeatedly raised concerns about his health in prison, his wife said.
She has reiterated these concerns several times since February 16, when leading opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in a penal colony in the Arctic.
Kara-Murza’s prison sentence, imposed in April 2023 after what he described as a show trial like that of the 1930s under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, is the harshest such sentence since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Kara-Murza was arrested in April 2022, accused of spreading false information about the armed forces and declared a “foreign agent.”
Hours earlier, CNN had broadcast an interview in which he said Russia was ruled by “a regime of murderers.”
The former journalist was later charged with treason over speeches he made about the war. In March 2022, he gave a speech to the Arizona House of Representatives in which he claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin was bombing Ukrainian homes, hospitals and schools.
Russia claims it does not deliberately target civilians, even though thousands have been killed in Ukraine.
Kara-Murza lost an appeal against his conviction in May, the same month he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary on columns he wrote from prison and published in the Washington Post.