Episode Details

In this episode of Today's Battlegrounds, H.R. McMaster and Vladimir Kara-Murza discuss the state of the war in Ukraine, the prospects and perils facing Russia's opposition, the shifting currents of Russian domestic politics, the effort to organize the Russian diaspora into a coherent political force, and prospects of a post-Putin Russia.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian opposition leader, historian, and journalist whose career has placed him at the center of the struggle over Russia's political future for two decades. A protégé of the murdered democratic leader Boris Nemtsov, Kara-Murza served as deputy leader of the People's Freedom Party in 2012 and helped shape the Magnitsky Act framework, which transformed targeted human-rights sanctions into a global instrument now used by the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, and Australia. He survived two poisonings, one in 2015 and one in 2017, attributed to Russian security services. Then in 2022, Russian authorities arrested him for publicly condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Contrived charges resulted in a twenty-five-year prison sentence in a maximum security prison in Siberia which is the longest sentence imposed on a political prisoner since the fall of the Soviet Union. He was released in 2024 as part of the largest East-West prisoner exchange since the Cold War. The same year, Kara-Murza won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary written and published in the Washington Post from his prison cell. He now sits on the newly formed Platform for Dialogue with Russian Democratic Forces run by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

H.R. McMaster is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He was the 25th assistant to the president for National Security Affairs. Upon graduation from the United States Military Academy in 1984, McMaster served as a commissioned officer in the United States Army for thirty-four years before retiring as a Lieutenant General in June 2018.