Putin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza in coma after being ‘poisoned with mystery substance’, wife says

A prominent Kremlin critic and Russian opposition figure who has been in a coma since last week has been diagnosed with “acute poisoning by an undefined substance”, his wife has said.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, 35, who works for Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia foundation, had been in Russia to screen a documentary film about his friend Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader and former deputy prime minister who was gunned down near the Kremlin in 2015.

Kara-Murza was about to fly back to the US for his daughter’s eighth birthday when he woke up at 5am on Thursday with an accelerated heartbeat and difficulty breathing. He remained in a stable but critical condition on Tuesday in a medically induced coma, his wife, Yevgeniya, said.

Kara-Murza was taken to the same hospital in 2015, when he was diagnosed with acute kidney failure in connection with poisoning and only just survived. He later said it had been an attempt to kill him for his political activities. The symptoms were the same in this latest attempt on his life, his wife said.

The family has sent blood samples to laboratories in France and Israel in an attempt to identify the poison, which they were unable to do last time.

On Tuesday she said Donald Trump, who said in an interview this weekend that he respected Vladimir Putin, should realise that a true leader would not allow people to be “poisoned because of their beliefs”.