Vladimir Putin's downfall 'is now inevitable' says exiled Russian opposition leader

A British-Russian dissident reportedly claims that Vladimir Putin’s downfall is now "inevitable” following his release from a Siberian jail.

Vladimir Kara-Murza was among those freed in a historic prisoner swap between Russia and the West last month. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer was serving 25 years on charges of treason – widely seen as politically motivated.

The Kremlin critic spent two years of his sentence for opposing Putin’s war on Ukraine before he was released from the Siberian penal colony and now he is one of the most high-profile of opposition figures to the Russian leader.

The dissent, who holds both Russian and British nationality, is reportedly convinced that while opponents of Putin can be eliminated, new ones will replace them to bring down the regime.

Mr Kara-Murza has come close to death having escaped attempts to poison him in 2015 and 2017 but he is resolute that he is prepared to return to Russia and risk his life to bring about change.

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Speaking from the UK, Mr Kara-Murza told the Independent: “Even if Vladimir Putin kills all of us, the current leaders of the opposition, others will come in our place. Others from the younger generation. The people who turned out in the tens of thousands for the funeral procession of Alexei Navalny in Moscow earlier this year. People who have been leaving these flowers at makeshift memorials all over the country. They will come and take our place to find a democratic Russia, even when none of us are there.”

He believes the fall of Putin’s regime is inevitable and the West needs to think ahead to the consequences of that. “The one thing we certainly know from the modern history of Russia is that major political changes in our country happen at the snap of a finger. Sudden, unexpected, with nobody seeing them coming,” he said. “None of us knows when or precisely in what circumstances the next political change will come in Russia, but it will, because nothing is forever. It might be in three years; it might be in two months. But it will come.”

The poisonings that Kara-Murza suffered have left him with a nerve condition polyneuropathy which affects his fingers and toes, and his 25-year imprisonment was seen as a “death sentence”. But on future threats to him he said that he was not going to be “paranoid”. He continued: “I know that what I am doing is the right thing to do. I know that I am right.I know that Russia will be better off as a normal democratic country and not an archaic, corrupt dictatorship that it is today.”