World
Lawmakers call for release of Putin’s ‘political prisoner number one'
A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers marked the two-year anniversary of Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza’s imprisonment by calling for his immediate release.
Kara-Murza, who lives in solitary confinement in a Siberian maximum-security prison, was sentenced to 25 years last April for treason and other related charges as Russian authorities continue their crackdown on domestic dissent.
The Moscow City Court claimed Kara-Murza was guilty of “high treason“ for “disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian Armed Forces” when he delivered a speech to the Arizona House of Representatives in 2022 that criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Jailed Russian opposition figure and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is serving a 25-year sentence over charges including treason over criticism of the Ukraine offensive, appears in court with a video link from his prison for a hearing in the case against inaction of the Investigative Committee of Russia on his poisoning, in Moscow on Feb. 22, 2024. (Photo by ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images)
His sentence is the longest term handed down to a political prisoner in the post-Soviet era.
Sens. Ben Cardin, D-Md., and Roger Wicker, R-Miss., co-led a group of 80 bipartisan lawmakers urging the Biden administration to declare the Russian dissident as “unlawfully and wrongfully detained.”
Fox News Digital obtained a letter sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Cardin and other lawmakers demanding Kara-Murza’s release and the aforementioned designation.
“There is little time left to end the ongoing and unjust detention of U.S. Legal Permanent Resident and Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza,” the letter read in part. “Mr. Kara-Murza’s family has grave concerns that he may not survive much longer. His situation is even more perilous following the killing of Alexei Navalny. Mr. Kara-Murza is the most prominent imprisoned democracy activist still alive in Russia.”
Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., left, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., and James Roscoe listen as Evgenia Kara-Murza, human rights advocate and wife of Vladimir Kara-Murza, speaks about her husband. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
The State Department referred Fox News Digital to spokesperson Matthew Miller’s remarks on Kara-Murza’s two-year imprisonment anniversary but did not provide specifics when asked about efforts to give the Russian opposition leader the designation sought by U.S. lawmakers.
“The Department of State continuously reviews the circumstances surrounding the detentions of U.S. nationals overseas, including those in Russia, for indicators that they are wrongful. When making assessments, the Department conducts a legal, fact-based review that looks into the totality of the circumstances for each case individually,” a spokesperson said.
Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza, left, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Fox News/Getty Images)
Russian human rights lawyer and the Center for European Policy Analysis’ Democracy Fellow Grigory Vaypan told Fox News Digital that Kara-Murza is now Russia’s “prisoner number one.”
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“He’s definitely political prisoner number one on Putin’s list, and his life is certainly in danger now that we see with the murder of Navalny that Putin’s regime demonstrates to the world that it’s willing to kill political prisoners in Russia,” Vaypan said.
He added that Kara-Murza, who was reportedly poisoned twice in 2015 and 2017 by agents of the Russian state, is essentially on “Putin’s death row.”
A flower and a picture are left as a tribute to Russian politician Alexi Navalny, near to the Russian Embassy in London on Sunday, Feb. 18, 2024. Navalny, who crusaded against Russian corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests as President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe, died Feb. 16, 2024 in the Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
“His health is deteriorating. He has never fully recovered from the effects of those two poisonings. Now, he is not only in prison, he’s on solitary confinement, which is basically indefinite. He can be in his tiny prison cell for many months, and with the effects of those two poisonings, his health is getting worse,” Vaypan explained. “This is why it would be fair to say that he’s essentially on Putin’s death row now.”
Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights group, counts roughly 700 political prisoners in Russia today.
Political prisoners are further isolated and punished in an effort to prevent them from continuing to speak out against the Russian authorities. They can be put into solitary confinement, deprived of food, mail, phone calls with relatives or family visits.
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“There’s a wide array of those measures that the Russian prison authorities can resort to. And we’re increasingly seeing that, especially after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion [of] Ukraine, we’ve seen more people jailed for exercising their right to free speech,” Vaypan told Fox News Digital. “And we’ve seen an increasing number of people being further harassed and pressured even while in prison.”
Kara-Murza’s wife, Evgenia, reflected on the deaths of other Russian opposition figures like Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov at the hands of the Putin regime.
“[They] target the most courageous, the most principled, those Russians who risk not only their freedom but very often their lives to show you that Russia can be different,” she said at an event on Capitol Hill.
Evgenia Kara-Murza, human rights advocate and wife of Vladimir Kara-Murza, listens during an event calling for the immediate release of her husband, who is a Russian opposition leader and journalist imprisoned by the Russian government, on Tuesday, April 9, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
“As my husband put it, and I quote, ‘It is my hope that when people in the free world today think and speak about Russia, they will remember not only the war criminals who are sitting in the Kremlin but also those who are standing up to them because we are Russians too.’”
The Spanish government is seeking to contain a scandal linked to EU pandemic funds, categorically denying that it used European money to pay pensions, as member states prepare for tough budget talks amid deep divisions over how funding should be allocated.
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An official in Madrid with direct knowledge of how EU funds are structured told Euronews that a technical matter is being instrumentalised in a way that is “simply false”, accusing the opposition of playing politics over what it describes as an accounting issue.
A Spanish budget watchdog reported earlier this month that the government of Pedro Sánchez used budget credits linked to the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), an economic plan partly funded through common debt designed to revitalise the bloc’s economy after Covid, to partly finance Spanish pensions in November 2024.
Madrid insists it did not breach the rules.
The European Commission asked Madrid for clarification after initial newspaper reports, according to a person familiar with the matter. It did not issue a follow-up request once Madrid provided an explanation, and Spanish authorities consider the issue closed.
However, the political scandal lingers, even as Madrid insists that “not a single euro” of EU money has been misused, amid backlash in so-called frugal countries. Spain and Italy were the biggest beneficiaries of the €750 billion recovery fund approved in summer 2020 after difficult talks.
In Madrid, the opposition People’s Party has demanded that Sánchez appear before Congress to explain the matter. The issue is also making waves in the European Parliament, with strong reactions from conservative lawmakers.
“If these allegations are confirmed, we are facing a serious abuse of European taxpayers’ money,” wrote Tomáš Zdechovský (Czechia/EPP), an influential centre-right member of the European Parliament’s budgetary committee, on X. “Europe cannot tolerate any misuse of recovery funds.”
“Is €10 billion in EU funds, intended for recovery after the pandemic, quietly being used to help pay Spanish pensions? It would confirm our worst fears about these funds,” said Dirk Gotink (The Netherlands/EPP).
Madrid sources insist the issue is being overblown for political purposes.
A government official pointed to the country’s economic performance and pushed back against the frugal-versus-south narrative, which often presents the wealthier north subsidising the weaker south. “Spain is the fastest growing economy in Europe, Germany is not paying our pensions,” said a second Madrid official.
The incident does, however, underscore the additional complications the country is facing due to its inability to approve a budget in a fragmented parliament. After failing to deliver a fresh budget for 2025, Madrid was forced to roll over a plan approved in 2023.
A fight over the EU’s financial future
The timing of the controversy is particularly sensitive.
Brussels is preparing to launch negotiations on the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), the EU’s seven-year budget for 2028–2034, and a central question will be what to do with the roughly €750 billion in joint debt accumulated through the recovery plan.
That programme was the largest and most politically consequential collective borrowing exercise in EU history. Whether it is ultimately seen as a success or a cautionary tale will inevitably shape how member states approach future proposals for shared financing.
Spain, the second-largest recipient of the initiative’s funding with a total of around €60 billion already received, has been among the most vocal advocates for an ambitious European budget and a permanent mechanism to pool financing needs.
Spanish Finance Minister Carlos Cuerpo has argued that pooling national debt at the EU level could generate annual savings of up to €25 billion.
Cuerpo, who is now Sánchez’s number two in government, echoed remarks made by France, Mario Draghi and a number of European intellectuals calling for a more efficient borrowing mechanism that would allow the EU to tap into the European Commission’s triple-A rating and lower financing costs for all 27 member states.
While the European Commission’s current budget proposal does not include new borrowing, contentious debate lies ahead over how to finance the repayment of existing recovery debt. Frugal northern countries like the Netherlands and Germany favour strict repayment schedules, even if that means cuts to other spending programmes.
On Thursday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz reiterated his country’s opposition, even if the German central bank has been more nuanced about the benefits and risks of pooling debt.
Southern member states, including France and Greece, are pushing to roll over the debt accumulated during the pandemic, with President Emmanuel Macron describing calls for early repayments as “idiotic”. Paris is an advocate of a European safe-asset mechanism.
A European official supportive of the plan said the Spanish controversy is being weaponised not so much against Madrid, but against proposals put forward by southern countries ahead of the budget talks.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if this is used to kill rollover proposal,” the diplomat said.
The issue of the next European budget will feature in an EU summit scheduled in June.
The United States and China will discuss guardrails on artificial intelligence, including establishing a protocol for keeping powerful A.I. models out of the hands of nonstate actors, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Thursday.
Mr. Bessent, who was speaking from Beijing in an interview with CNBC, did not give more details, including when these discussions would take place. But Xi Jinping, China’s leader, and President Trump had been expected to discuss A.I. during their summit in the Chinese capital.
If these talks happen, it would be the first time the two countries formally take up the issue during Mr. Trump’s second term. The capabilities and usage of A.I. have grown rapidly, and so have concerns that this technology could be weaponized by hackers and terrorists, or spiral out of human control.
“The two A.I. superpowers are going to start talking,” Mr. Bessent said. “We’re going to set up a protocol in terms of, how do we go forward with best practices for A.I. to make sure nonstate actors don’t get ahold of these models.”
Still, Mr. Bessent made clear that the fierce competition between the United States and China for supremacy in A.I. — which has been a major hurdle to cooperation on safety — remained front of mind for U.S. policymakers. Officials and experts in both countries have argued that they cannot slow technological development and risk losing out to their rivals.
Mr. Bessent said that the United States was willing to cooperate with China on A.I. safety because “the Chinese are substantially behind us” in terms of the technology’s development.
“I do not think we would be having the same discussions if they were this far ahead of us. So we’re going to put in U.S. best practices, U.S. values, on this, and then roll those out to the world,” Mr. Bessent said.
Experts have suggested that China’s A.I. models may be a few months behind the leading U.S. models.
Another hurdle to the United States and China working together on A.I. safety is that they have generally focused on different potential threats.
American experts have generally highlighted existential risks, such as the possibility of artificial general intelligence, or super-intelligence that exceeds that of humans. Chinese researchers and officials have more often highlighted risks related to social stability and information control, such as the possibility of chatbots producing content that challenges China’s leadership and policies.
Still, researchers in both countries have highlighted some shared risks, such as the possibility of A.I. being used to develop new biological weapons.
Ship SEIZED near UAE coast, UK military says
Iranian forces seized a vessel 38 nautical miles off the UAE coast early Thursday, a brazen provocation occurring just as President Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met in Beijing discussing key issues like the Strait of Hormuz.
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A ship was seized off the coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) near the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday morning, the British military reported.
The ship was boarded and “taken by unauthorized personnel” while it was roughly 38 nautical miles northeast of the United Arab Emirates’ oil export terminal Fujairah, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) reported Thursday.
UKMTO spotted the ship heading toward Iranian territorial waters after the seizure, it reported Thursday.
British authorities did not release information on who the ship belonged to or who seized it. Despite the lack of official corroboration, the BBC reported that the Honduras-flagged Hui Chuan was seized in the Strait on Thursday.
CARGO SHIP ATTACKED BY SMALL CRAFT NEAR STRAIT OF HORMUZ, UK MARITIME AGENCY SAYS
Ships are anchored in the Strait of Hormuz off Bandar Abbas in southern Iran on May 4. A report on May 15 said a ship was seized off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and is being brought toward Iranian waters. (Amirhossein Khorgooei/ISNA/AFP)
Citing the risk-management company Vanguard, the BBC reported that the ship’s operators told Vanguard that the Hui Chuan was operating as a “floating armory” for ships in the Strait to defend themselves from pirates.
A container ship sits at anchor in the Strait of Hormuz off Bandar Abbas, Iran, as a motorboat passes in the foreground on May 2, 2026. (Amirhosein Khorgooi/ISNA via AP)
At least two other ships have already been seized in the Strait of Hormuz since February.
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A cargo ship sails in the Persian Gulf toward the Strait of Hormuz on April 22, 2026. (AP Photo)
In April, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) seized the Panamanian-flagged MSC Francesca and the Epaminondes ships in the Strait.
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Fox News Digital contacted UKMTO and Vanguard for further information but did not immediately receive a response.
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