Cameron pledges to do ‘everything he can’ to bring home jailed Russian-British Kremlin critic

The foreign secretary has assured the family of jailed British-Russian Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza that they will “do everything it can to bring him home” in a landmark meeting.

Lord David Cameron met with Evgenia Kara-Murza, 43, in Whitehall for crunch talks on Friday afternoon about a possible prisoner swap for her husband.

The meeting, which The Independent revealed on Wednesday was going ahead, is the first time a British foreign secretary has met with Mrs Kara-Murza since her husband was arrested in April 2022 and later sentenced to 25 years in a Siberian penal colony.

It is widely believed that he was imprisoned on trumped-up charges of treason for speaking out against Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. His sentence is the longest in post-Soviet history.

The Cambridge-educated politician and journalist, who spent years working for independent Russian newspapers in London, has since September been kept in a punishment cell similar to the one the authorities held Alexei Navalny in before he died.

And the opposition leader, whose mentor Boris Nemtsov was murdered outside the Kremlin in 2015, is suffering from a nerve condition called polyneuropathy that is worsening by the day. It was caused, says his wife, by two poisoning attempts on his life, carried out by the same FSB team that killed Mr Nemtsov and tried to murder Mr Navalny in 2020 using novichok.