Kara-Murza was late to our interview because he was at the hospital, receiving treatment for being poisoned, for the second time. He is a journalist and political activist who recently produced a documentary about his friend Boris Nemtsov, an opposition politician who was murdered in 2015.
I sat down with Kara-Murza in northwest Washington, D.C., where he lived from 2004 to 2012 while working as a TV news bureau chief, before returning to Russia. To read his blog, go here.
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Ben Parker: How is Donald Trump portrayed in Russian media, particularly state TV? How is the latest scandal involving Donald Trump Jr. being covered?
Vladimir Kara-Murza: Mr. Peskov, who is Putin’s press spokesman, whose main job seems to be denying things all the time, came out and denied that the Kremlin has any connection to Veselnitskaya. I can tell you that given the way this regime operates, and the total command and control vertical structure, it’s absolutely impossible that there would be a contact between someone like Veselnitskaya, who’s spent years lobbying on behalf of the Kremlin against the Magnitsky Act, and the campaign of a leading U.S. presidential candidate without prior approval and knowledge of somebody at the top of the regime.
A lot of people have been focused on whether there’s been collusion on the part of the Trump campaign because of this meeting. I’m not going to comment on that. I think you have enough Russians trying to meddle in U.S. domestic politics. I’m not going to do that.
For me, the most important aspect of the story is why she was there. She was there to lobby against the Magnitsky Act, to try to overturn it, to undermine it, which again goes to show how important it is for the Kremlin to try to kill this law. I think, actually, one of the main things we should take from this story is to see and to continue to watch how the Magnitsky Act continues to be implemented by the U.S. government.
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01.19.2025