'Appeasing an Aggressor Never Leads to Peace': Vladimir Kara-Murza
The brave Russian dissident who Putin poisoned and imprisoned stood tall and condemned tyrants, emphasizing that gatherings like LibCon2025 are essential to defeating them
The following is Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza’s dinner keynote address that received a standing ovation on Thursday, Aug. 14, at the second-annual “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference, convened by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism (ISMA), the publisher of The UnPopulist.
If not for an incredible twist of diplomatic fortune, Vladimir Kara-Murza would still be in a Russian prison serving a 25-year sentence for the crime of condemning an unjust war and demanding democratic reform. That he is here with us this evening truly is a gift. That he continues to speak with clarity, with courage, with an unwavering resolve, that is something more. That is moral character formed under pressure, a conviction purchased at a very dear price.
Kara-Murza is a historian by training, a journalist by craft, and a dissident by necessity. He was a close colleague to Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader assassinated in 2015 just steps away from the Kremlin. Like Nemtsov, Kara-Murza has long stood as a principled critic of authoritarian rule and a clear voice for the reconstruction of a liberal-democratic Russia.
He played a central role in advancing the Magnitsky movement, a model of targeted sanctions that holds individual human rights abusers accountable even when their domestic systems won’t. Twice he was poisoned, both times he nearly died, and he returned to Russia anyway.
In 2022, he was arrested for condemning Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. The state charged him with treason. His words, spoken abroad, were used as evidence that he was a threat, not for violence, but for dissent. Yet from his prison, he continued to write. His commentaries published in Western media from behind bars were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2024. They are not just eloquent—they are ethically unflinching.
He’s been called the conscience of the Russian opposition, and that’s true. But he is also something rarer. He’s a builder—a builder of the liberal-democratic project, even in exile and imprisoned. Kara-Murza has articulated a roadmap for democratic reconstruction, a plan not for revenge, not for collapse, but for building institutions that are worthy of trust and the rule of law. He insists what comes after Putin cannot repeat the errors of the 1990s: democratic form, but without a liberal culture; private wealth, but without earned legitimacy. That insistence speaks to us here. Those gathered here believe in liberal democracy not as an abstraction, but as an architecture that recognizes the inherent dignity of every person. I believe that. I know every single person in this room believes that. But I have to admit that I pursued my piece of the liberal project within a system that, despite very real decay and very real concerns, still permits my dissent, still protects my speech. Kara-Murza has done this work within systems that do not.
So let us be clear about what this evening is. It’s going to be a rocking keynote address. I know that. But it’s also a recognition of what our principles demand when they become dangerous to those in power. It is a chance to hear from someone who chose the risk, bore the cost, and still holds the line, unwilling to rest until every single one of his countrymen breathes the air of freedom.
Please join me in welcoming Vladimir Kara-Murza.
Vladimir Kara-Murza: Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, thank you so much for the kind invitation to the conference, for the very gracious introduction, and for the honor of speaking with you this evening.
This conference has been in preparation for many weeks, so the organizers of course could not know just how symbolic its timing was going to be—we are gathering here on the eve of a meeting in Alaska between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, a meeting that could decide the fate of a sovereign democratic nation in the center of Europe. One would be forgiven for checking the calendar to see if it is 2025 or 1938.
The great 19th-century Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky once observed that, “history does not teach anyone anything, it only punishes those who fail to learn its lessons.” One of the clearest lessons from history is that appeasing an aggressor will never lead to peace. We do not need to go back to the 1930s to ascertain this indisputable truth—it is enough to look at the past quarter century of Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia.
Like many autocrats throughout history, Putin came to power in a democratic way. No military takeover, no uprisings, no violent coups—just the regular, boring constitutional procedure. Twenty-six years ago this month, in fact, in August of 1999, the ailing and term-limited president Boris Yeltsin nominated Vladimir Putin as the new prime minister of Russia. I recently re-read the record of the parliamentary session that confirmed him in the post, and what is most striking about it is its mundanity and uneventfulness. Just a few members on the liberal side of the Duma raised concerns about trusting a government position to a former KGB officer—but other than that, there was nothing that was remarkable. It was almost like a passing episode. Putin was confirmed by a vote of 233-84, and parliament went on to consider other business.
It was just a few weeks until the start of the mysterious series of apartment explosions all across Russia that would be blamed by the Putin government on “Chechen terrorists” and would serve as a pretext for the brutal military assault on the North Caucasus Republic. Nothing consolidates political power like fear and war—and Putin used both to his advantage. That December’s parliamentary election brought unexpected gains for his party and on New Year’s Eve President Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned, leaving Vladimir Putin in charge of our country.
The last time Russia held anything approaching a free and fair election was in March of 2000, more than 25 years ago. This is not my personal opinion—this is the conclusion of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which serves as the gold standard in election observation in our part of the world.
“I think gatherings like this are very important, and I want to thank, once again, the organizers of this conference who bring together freedom fighters and democracy activists and people who care about these issues from different parts of the country, different parts of the world. Because what we do know is that the autocrats are very good at cooperating with each other, and learning of each other, and taking each other’s experiences. The autocrats club is a very exclusive one but it’s also a very close knit one and very effective. Why don’t we do something similar?” — Vladimir Kara-Murza
I was 18 years old at the time. This was the first time I voted in a presidential election—and, for all intents and purposes, it was the last. Putin squeezed into victory officially with 52% of the vote, just enough to avoid a runoff. Subsequent media investigations pointed to ballot stuffing in different regions across Russia that almost certainly helped Putin over that finish line. My vote went to Grigory Yavlinsky, prominent economist and founder of the liberal Yabloko Party, whose entire campaign was one big warning about what was to come. His TV ads showed political prisoners in a future gulag and Russian soldiers immersed in a myriad of endless wars. This was in 2000.
But our society, at least the majority of it, chose not to listen. Bread and butter issues seemed more important and Putin was promising economic growth and political stability after the revolutionary upheavals of the 1990s. There is a fashionable myth that is propagated—often for reasons of self-justification by both politicians and analysts in Russia and in the West—that there were two different Putins: an early Putin who was a believer in reform and modernization and co-operation with the West, and then something went horribly wrong along the way. So the myth goes. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I am no oracle, but I remember the day when I understood just who this man was and what direction he was going to take our country. It was the 20th of December, 1999, a day that is still celebrated by Russian security services to mark the anniversary of the founding of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, in December of 1917. That day, Vladimir Putin, still prime minister of Russia, went to Lubyanka Square, to the former KGB, now the FSB, headquarters, to officially unveil a memorial plaque to Yuri Andropov. Now Andropov was someone who symbolized everything that was wrong with the Soviet system, both in terms of internal repression and in terms of the external aggression. As Soviet ambassador to Budapest, he had been one of the architects of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956; as longtime chairman of the Soviet KGB, he prioritized the suppression of domestic political dissent, setting up a special directorate of the KGB to go after people who disagree with the Soviet regime, expanding the horrendous practice of punitive psychiatry, which meant that people who oppose the Communist system were declared mentally insane and kept in torturous conditions in so-called special psychiatric hospitals. That was Andropov’s legacy. And that was the man that Putin chose to unveil a memorial plaque to in his first few months as prime minister of Russia.
Again, I am no oracle, but after that day, I had no more questions. And just in case somebody was still unsure, in the first year of his presidency, Putin brought back the music of the Soviet national anthem, once personally picked by Joseph Stalin, as the national anthem of the Russian federation.
It wasn’t long before symbols were followed by concrete actions. In one of his early interviews as acting president, Putin let slip a remark that, “whoever offends us will not survive three days.” It turned out that he meant it almost literally because, on the fourth day of his presidential inauguration, in May of 2000, Putin sent armed operatives from the FSB, the prosecutor general’s service, and the tax police, to raid the offices of Media-Most, which at the time was Russia’s largest private media holding and the parent company of NTV, the most popular, the most watched, television network in the country that was known both for the high professionalism and for the fierce independence of its news coverage and editorial policy. It was also known for hard-hitting political satire—one of its flagship programs was called Kukli (Puppets), sort of similar to a program, Spitting Image, that existed in Great Britain back in the ’80s where they would take a work of literature and insert the characters from the actual political world. And what was probably the last straw for NTV was an episode of Kukli that aired right in the middle of the presidential campaign in 2000—aired to the whole country. It was an episode based on a 19th-century German novel by Ernst Hoffmann called Little Zaches, and the plot of the story was that there was an ugly, evil dwarf who, because of a magic spell, suddenly became viewed and seen by everybody around him as this great magician, this wonderful person. And, of course, the logic of the story is that everything falls apart in the end and that people just see him for what he is: an evil and ugly dwarf. You can guess who portrayed the evil and ugly dwarf in that episode. Putin was furious and that night he was reported to have told his wife that [Vladimir] Gusinsky is finished—Gusinsky being the main shareholder of NTV.
“Like many autocrats throughout history, Putin came to power in a democratic way. No military takeover, no uprisings, no violent coups—just the regular, boring constitutional procedure … [But] nothing consolidates political power like fear and war—and Putin used both to his advantage.” — Vladimir Kara-Murza
Needless to say, authoritarianism was not compatible with either political satire or independent media. So one early Saturday dawn, in April of 2001—this is still the first year of Putin’s presidency—the NTV studios on the eighth floor of the Ostankino television center in Moscow were forcibly taken over by security guards from the state-run energy giant Gazprom that now claimed control of the company. Within two years, by the summer of 2023, all other independent television networks in Russia were also silenced by the Kremlin.
Benito Mussolini once remarked that he had consolidated his power in 1920s Italy in a manner of, “plucking the chicken feather by feather to lessen the squawking.” In this, Putin was a good student. His drive to dismantle Russia’s imperfect but real democracy left his predecessor was gradual, incremental, very determined. Independent media were the first feather he plucked.
The second would be the sources of support for the opposition and civil society—in fact, for any independent political activity in general. And the target was unmistakable. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil tycoon and the richest man in Russia at the time had long ruffled the Kremlin’s feathers with his support for independent media, civil society groups, and opposition parties and candidates in elections. In early 2003, he publicly accused Putin’s government of corruption. One morning in October, when Khodorkovsky’s private jet landed for refueling at Novosibirsk Airport, it was raided by an FSB SWAT team. Khodorkovsky was arrested, flown back to Moscow, and paraded on state television sitting in a courtroom literally in a metal cage. The richest man in Russia sitting in a cage. The message to the rest of Russia’s business community was very clear: You behave like him, you will end up like this. And the message was certainly heeded and everybody else fell in line.
The last obstacle on his road to autocracy was a parliament that still had many different political forces, that still had real debates, that still had a real opposition—needless to say, something that’s also incompatible with an authoritarian regime. The last obstacle was removed in December of 2003 with an election assessed by international observers as free but not fair. This is a direct quote from the observation mission statement from a parliamentary assembly of the council of Europe: “Free, but certainly not fair.” “Free” in the sense that opposition candidates could still participate—something that is completely impossible today; “not fair” because the results were pre-programmed before long before voting day by the full might of the Russian state.
I had a front-view seat on that election. I was a candidate for the Russian parliament for the liberal opposition in Moscow in December of 2003. (And that is a story I’ll be sure to tell in the book that I am currently working on.) The result of that vote was a removal of all pro-democracy parties from the Russian State Duma. Opening the first session of the new legislature, its speaker uttered words that I’m certain will go down in future history books that will be written about the Putin system when he said that “Parliament is not a place for discussion.”
What was most agonizing and exasperating for us in the Russian democratic opposition was to watch the indifference with which this authoritarian slide was being met by the majority of Russian citizens and the acquiescence that Putin was receiving from the democratic West. In the case of our own society, the explanation was as simple as it was shameful: the Russian economy was growing, the real incomes were increasing, the quality of life was improving in the most basic, everyday consumer sense. None of this because of Putin, but because of the rapid growth in global oil prices that just coincided with his arrival. But, of course, no one pays attention to such details—and Russian media, by now fully state-controlled, made sure to explain otherwise.
As for the behavior of the West, the best analysis I’ve heard was given nearly half a century ago by Vladimir Bukovsky, a legendary dissident, freedom fighter, and longtime prisoner of conscience in the Soviet Union: “For too many Western politicians,” he said, “frying their morning bacon on Soviet gas is far more important than any human rights concerns.” Just replace the word “Soviet” with “Russian” and little or nothing has changed.
As Putin was clearly building an authoritarian state, silencing the media, rigging elections, persecuting his opponents, Western leaders continued with business as usual. American presidents of both parties looked into Putin’s soul and pushed reset buttons. European leaders rolled out royal red carpets, signed lucrative deals, launched new gas pipelines all the while, I suppose, hoping to maintain some sort of a modus operandi with Mr. Putin in the international arena, at the price of ignoring and enabling his abuses inside of Russia—an immoral policy, if there ever was one. But also, a very impractical one. Because one other clear lesson from Russian history is that internal repression and external aggression are always two sides of one coin—because a government that tramples on the rights of its own people will never respect the borders of its neighbors.
And so from the censorship, from the repression, from the stifling of political freedom inside Russia came the most devastating military conflict waged on European soil since the Second World War: the war of aggression launched by the Putin regime against Ukraine.
But history doesn’t have only tragic lessons in store for us—it has some very hopeful ones as well. And one of them is that the determination to defend one’s rights and freedoms, the refusal to stay silent in the face of evil, the rejection of both indifference and acquiescence are what authoritarians fear the most.
Perhaps no one showed this more clearly than Soviet dissidents. To me, theirs is one of the most optimistic stories of the 20th century. The story of a relatively small group of people armed only with their word, their conscience, and their sense of dignity who stood up against a mighty totalitarian state armed with the world’s most developed machine of oppression. And, in the end, amazingly, they proved to be stronger. As Andrei Amalrik, a Russian historian—and famed dissident, himself—once wrote: “Dissenters did something brilliantly simple: in an unfree country, they began to behave like free people, thereby changing the moral climate and the country’s prevailing tradition.”
“History doesn’t have only tragic lessons in store for us—it has some very hopeful ones as well. And one of them is that the determination to defend one’s rights and freedoms, the refusal to stay silent in the face of evil, the rejection of both indifference and acquiescence are what authoritarians fear the most. Perhaps no one showed this more clearly than Soviet dissidents. To me, theirs is one of the most optimistic stories of the 20th century. The story of a relatively small group of people armed only with their word, their conscience, and their sense of dignity who stood up against a mighty totalitarian state armed with the world’s most developed machine of oppression.” — Vladimir Kara-Murza
Today’s Russia is as unfree as you can get. All feathers have been plucked long ago. We have no real elections, no real parliament, no real justice system, no freedom of the media, one perpetual and illegitimate dictator in power for a quarter of a century. And when it comes to political repression, Putin’s regime has long surpassed its post-Stalin Soviet predecessors. Only according to publicly available and self-admittedly incomplete figures we have from human rights groups, Today’s Russia holds 1,593 political prisoners, more than the whole of the USSR—that’s 15 countries put together—did in the mid-1980s.
And prison is not the worst that can await those who challenge Vladimir Putin’s rule. The two main leaders of Russia’s democratic opposition, Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny, have been murdered on Putin’s personal orders. One gunned down on a bridge in front of the Kremlin a decade ago; the other poisoned in an arctic penal colony in February of last year. But despite the darkness, despite the fear, despite the repression, there are still people in Russia—many people—who refuse to stay silent, who refused to become silent accomplices of Vladimir Putin’s crimes. It suffices to look at the official statistics for the persecutions of Russian citizens who have protested against the war in Ukraine, the hundreds who are in prisons, the thousands who face administrative charges, the tens of thousands detained by police at antiwar protests across Russia. They are all free people in an unfree country.
And it is not only those who are in jail. It is impossible to judge the state, the true state, of public opinion in a country that imprisons you for expressing it. But we do sometimes get what I like to call glimpses into how a lot of Russians actually feel about Putin and about his war. One such glimpse came earlier last year when, amid the staged circus and complete unanimity of our so-called presidential election, one candidate, a lawyer and a former member of parliament named Boris Nadezhdin, tried to run on an antiwar platform. And the response from the Russian public was unimaginable. Suddenly, all over the country, in large cities and small towns, from west to east, hours-long lines of people formed at the campaign headquarters to sign the nominating petitions, the nominating ballots to put him as a candidate, to make him registered officially. (When I say “signed,” I don’t mean just signed; I mean, you put your name, you put your home address, you put your passport number, you give all your personal information to the state, by definition.) And I cannot tell you how important this was for so many people around the country.
One of the few things that really helped sustain me in prison was the letters I was getting from all over Russia—and that winter, most of the letters I was getting were about those long lines, about those lines of people who stood in the Russian cold to sign the petition for the antiwar candidate. Now, of course, Nadezhdin was not allowed on the ballot—opposition candidates in today’s Russia never are. But that was almost besides the point. Because, suddenly, in a matter of days, everyone saw through the lie peddled by Putin’s propaganda machine that all Russians backed Putin’s regime, that all Russians supported the war.
I’ll never forget the letter one young woman from the black sea town of Novorossiysk in the South of Russia sent me in prison. After describing how she waited for hours and hours and hours in that long line of people waiting to sign the petition for the antiwar candidate, she finished her letter by saying: “I never realized how many of us there are.” This is my Russia. The Russia I love. The Russia I call home. The Russia Putin does not want you to see. Not the Russia of murderers and war criminals in the Kremlin, but the Russia of decent and courageous people who oppose them. Not the archaic, repressive, belligerent Russia of today, but a hopeful, peaceful, democratic Russia of tomorrow. Whatever Putin does to try to stop it, that future is coming. Now let us work together to try to bring it a little closer. Thank you very much.
Q&A
Question: You know Russian history much better than I do, but there is a pattern that goes back many years—with Stalin, etc. In the present day, what our problem is right now, here, is that we are not used to this sort of thing and we don’t quite know ... we are in a state of shock, if you like, because we have not experienced such things in our lifetime. So, our question is, can you help us?
Kara-Murza: Thank you very much for your question. On the first part of your question, that’s something I will definitely write about in the book.
We talked about myths already, right? Like the so-called early and late Putin. But there are much more ingrained myths that are very often pushed forward by people who are interested in having a dictatorship, who want to justify the reason why they sit in power for so long without free elections and so on. And this myth is that Russia was always like this—there were czars, emperors, general secretaries. This is a half-truth, and a half-truth as we all know is worse than a lie. Because the fact is—my specialty is the history of Europe, generally, but Russia, specifically—that since at least the 15th century, after the liberation of Russia from the Mongol invasion, there was a constant competition, constant conflict in Russia between the autocratic side and the constitutional side. And that constitutional side was always there—from the first attempts to limit the monarchy and introduce trial by jury and locally-elected self-governments in the 15th and 16th centuries to the 1610 Saltykov constitution, which was one of the first attempts in Europe, anywhere, to limit monarchy by a certain set of rules. This year, of course, we are celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Decembrist uprising in 1825, a movement to attempt to replace autocracy with the constitution monarchy in Russia. And then of course the great reforms of Alexander II in the late 19th century that brought us the abolition of serfdom four years before the abolition of slavery here in the U.S, that brought us locally-elected government, trial by jury, freedom of the press, autonomy for universities, and so on and so forth. And, of course, in the early 20th century, a full constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament and political pluralism.
So, the truth about Russian history is that there has always been this conflict and, of course, yes there have always been czars and general secretaries in autocracy. That is true as well. So what we are trying to do is to make sure that our side finally comes victorious in this because while it has been 500 years, I think that’s quite enough of this conflict. That’s an aside but I couldn’t leave that comment unanswered. Because it’s important. There is a democratic constitutional tradition in Russia. It may not be as strong as we wish but there is one, and it counts centuries of history. And I have no doubt one day it will come out on top.
On your question, I would never presume to give any advice or otherwise try to instruct people what they should do in their own country. That is certainly not my place. What I will say is that I think gatherings like this are very important, and I want to thank, once again, the organizers of this conference who bring together freedom fighters and democracy activists and people who care about these issues from different parts of the country, different parts of the world. Because what we do know is that the autocrats are very good at cooperating with each other, and learning of each other, and taking each other’s experiences.
The autocrats club is a very exclusive one but it’s also a very close knit one and very effective. Why don’t we do something similar? Why don’t we, who believe in democracy and political freedom, why don’t we start working together across borders to make sure we can defeat these autocrats? Because, at the end of the day, these problems don’t stop at national borders. The problem of illiberalism, populism, rising autocracy, and all the challenges and problems that democracies have been facing in recent years and decades, those aren’t problems with one particular country, certainly not just of yours; it’s all over, it’s across the democratic world. Look at what’s happening in Germany, England, France, everywhere. So why don’t we join forces and start working together to make sure we defeat them? Because we know that we are right and that’s one difference between us and them.
Question: Very privileged to be in the room with someone of your courage. My question is: One thing you didn’t talk about was the role of nationalism and ideology in Putin’s rise to power. I’ve heard it said, mostly by Americans, that there are some parallels between the idea of “making America great again” and Putin’s rhetoric around making Russia great again. I was wondering if you could give your perspective on that.
Kara-Murza: Thank you so much. That’s an important question. First of all, with regards to Russia, I will say that most of the stuff that we hear from international media about the so-called ideology of the Putin regime is totally fake. That’s just a façade they need to put out. Because for years and years the main goal of these people was to loot the country that they just by accident happened to be put in charge of; to get as much material, as many resources, out of the country as possible; to park it all out in some foreign, offshore bank accounts; and then to keep their power for as long as possible to protect the stolen money. Essentially that, in a nutshell, that was the whole modus operandi of the Putin regime.
Now, it doesn’t sound too good when you say it—it’s not much of an ideology—so they had to make something up. Hence all the stuff about conservative values, Christian values, and family values. I mean, I always knew this was hypocrisy and lies, but I have to say, I feel it much more personally now since my own experience in a Russian prison. Because I’m an Orthodox Christian, I was not allowed to go to church because the regime seeks to punish its opponents in every single way possible. I was not allowed to call my wife and my children throughout the time I was in prison. Once, I got a 15-minute phone call. I have three kids, so my wife had to stand there on the other side passing the phone with a stopwatch, to make sure that each child got no more than five minutes and then she’ll take the phone away. Because they torture the families not just the opponents. That’s something that has been going back to the Soviet times. How is that for Christian, family values?
This is all complete nonsense, to use a diplomatic word—nothing to do with reality. But, unfortunately, a lot of this nonsense has been effective because we are seeing some Western influencers, media figures—Tucker Carlson is the most obvious one, but there are others—who are falling for this. So I think it’s really important to keep calling it out at every opportunity. There is no ideology. There are no values. Their only value is the money value that they can measure their foreign, offshore bank accounts in. And they need to stay in power for as long as they can because they know that once they lose power, they lose everything.
“Benito Mussolini once remarked that he had consolidated his power in 1920s Italy in a manner of, ‘plucking the chicken feather by feather to lessen the squawking.’ In this, Putin was a good student. His drive to dismantle Russia’s imperfect but real democracy left his predecessor was gradual, incremental, very determined. Independent media were the first feather he plucked.” — Vladimir Kara-Murza
By the way, it’s very interesting, not many people are paying attention to the question of why tomorrow’s meeting is happening in Alaska, of all places. Well, because that’s the only way for Putin to fly directly from Russia to the U.S. without crossing any country’s airspace that is subject to the jurisdiction of the Inernational Criminal Court. Because Putin is an indicted war criminal, with an active arrest warrant, and he is paranoid about a country that is subject to the ICC’s jurisdiction downing his place and bringing him to the Hague like Milošević was. That is the reason for that, let’s not forget that. The person your president is meeting with tomorrow is not a legitimate president of our country—he’s a usurper, a dictator, and an indicted war criminal.
Question: You mentioned Anchorage. You’ve obviously watched Putin over many years. Can you give us some insight into the ways that Putin manipulates others? His KGB training, perhaps? I’ve seen that speculated about. But to the degree you can, offer us some insights into the way Putin operates one-on-one with Trump in private.
Kara-Murza: Thank you for this. This is a really important question because Putin himself has said publicly on several occasions that the favorite part of his job, when he worked in the Soviet KGB, was recruiting. He said it himself. And, we have to admit it, he is a pretty good recruiter. He’s good at what he does. Because what a recruiter has to do is to basically make the interlocutor like him, make the interlocutor think that he thinks like him, that they are of the same mind, to make the interlocutor sympathize with him on a human level. And there are countless and countless examples of this over the years, but I will give just three for the purpose of time—but also because those three happen to be your presidents.
The first meeting of Putin with President George W. Bush was in Slovenia in 2001. Now, he knew, because he has his KGB guys bringing him folders with papers and with detailed dossiers on every person he’s going to be meeting with, that George W. Bush is a devout Christian. So what does he tell him? He tells him a story about how his Dosha burned down and the only thing that survived was a cross that his mother had given him. Anyone with even a little knowledge of Soviet history … a KGB officer wearing a cross? He would’ve been sacked and arrested the next day. Religion was for all intents and purposes banned in the Soviet Union. Definitely for state officials, that was never allowed. So this story is complete baloney, but I guess President Bush didn’t know much of Russian history, so he just fell for it. And it was then that he went out to that press conference and said that “I looked into Putin’s eyes and got a sense of his soul.” It was after that story.
Example number two: President Obama, who came to power on the promise of reform, and modernization, and hope and change. So what does Putin do? He puts in a puppet president, which conveniently also helped him circumvent the constitutional term limits by remaining fully in charge. But having a puppet president, so-called president, named Dmitry Medvedev, who talks about reform and modernization and hope and change and all the rest of it. And the Obama reset policy was a complete disaster with regard to Putin and it led to the annexation of Crimea in 2014. That’s how Putin used his recruitment skills against that American administration.
Finally, the current resident of the White House. You know, when I read that story, that Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff went to Moscow and Putin told him that he went to the church to pray for Trump after the assassination attempt and gave him an oil painting of him because he knew that personal vanity is something that’s going to work with this guy. And he was seriously talking about this and I thought, “How old is he? I mean, has he ever heard of who Putin is?” He has been there for 25 years—it’s not something new or fresh. And, yes, it is funny, but it’s also really sad how Western governments and Western leaders continue to keep falling for these recruiting tactics of an old KGB officer.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
I can't read this without being struck by the parallels to the United States. This country, too, is led by criminals whose only goal is looting, and who invent ideology around that goal.
Kara-Murza has and continues to get so much wrong about Putin and Russia.
Putin for years (and foreign policy experts before him) warned about how grievous a mistake it would be for the U.S. to meddle in Ukraine and try to pull it into NATO. The brightest of red lines for Russia...it would be the equivalent of Russia overthrowing the govt of Canada or Mexico and turning it into an aggressive puppet proxy against the United States. Heck look at how we were about to lash out over Soviet missiles in Cuba
This was a foreign policy misadventure that we should've never waded into...ultimately John Mearsheimer got it right, Stephen F Cohen (RIP) got it right. These are the voices we needed to be amplifying years ago
Thankfully we have a President now who isn't interested in doubling down and getting us all killed in a nuclear war with Russia, because that's where we were headed. And calling Russia the aggressor here...come on now. That dog won't hunt