How Vulin embarrassed Serbia: details of monitoring and wiretapping of a Russian opposition member who was sentenced to 25 years in prison

Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for treason and other charges related to criticism of the war in Ukraine.

The former Russian-British journalist and politician is the latest of many Putin opponents to be arrested or forced to flee Russia.

He has denied the accusations and stressed that he is proud of his work.

“Not only do I not regret any of this, I am proud of it,” he said at the Kara-Murzi trial.

Kara-Murza was arrested on 11 April 2022, as we were told at the time, after publicly criticising the Kremlin regime, which he called “a regime of murderers”.

As sources close to Kara-Murza told the Nova.rs portal beforehand, he had the option of staying outside Russia during the war, but he refused, explaining that he did not want to leave his country and that it was his duty as leader of the opposition to stay in the country. When explaining the reasons for his arrest, our portal’s interlocutors stated that Kara-Murza ended up in prison on the basis of a law that the Kremlin government uses when it wants to settle scores with opposition leaders.

“This was done on the basis of Article 19.3 of the law, which is regularly used when the government wants to settle scores with political dissidents. Masha Alyokhina was arrested in this way. She was arrested six times in one year using this explanation. You can practically be arrested for not showing your passport to a police officer and that is given as a reason why you are not at large. They literally pick you up off the street, take you to the police station and then make up the excuse that you did not cooperate with the police, even though we all know that this is not the main reason for arrest,” says our interlocutor. .

Relations with Serbia

Vladimir Kara-Murza once spoke in an interview with the daily “Nova” about the wiretapping of Russian opposition members in Belgrade, which involved, among others, the current Minister of Police, Aleksandar Vulin.

In the interview with “Nova”, he described in detail how he was followed by members of the Serbian police, noting that his colleagues were under constant surveillance while in Belgrade, where they were holding a meeting of local opposition representatives from Russia.

“Even when we took a boat tour on the Danube, we were constantly followed by another boat. It was even funny for us, but now we see that this was done deliberately and that the Serbian services did it in order to show Serbian Minister Vulin as a loyal dog of Putin’s Secretary Patrushev. All our conversations at the meeting were recorded. Let me say that I hope that Vulin and Patrushev have learnt something, if I have listened to them. A week after our meeting, Vulin came to Moscow and personally brought the transcripts of our talks to Nikolai Patrushev, and at the end of the same month my friend, colleague and co-organiser of the meeting in Belgrade, Aleksei Pivovarov, was arrested,” he said.

Lawyer sees link between wiretaps and arrest

One of the speakers at the Russian opposition rally in Belgrade, lawyer Dimitrij Zahvatov, confirmed to Nova.rs that they were followed while in Serbia. He provided our portal with photographs and videos of the people responsible for following them closely. He added that he was convinced that the arrests of Pivovarov and then of Kara-Murza were linked to the events in the Serbian capital.

“It is obvious that this joint action resulted in the arrest of Andrei Pivovarov. He was arrested two weeks after our return from Serbia and after Aleksandar Vulin handed over the transcripts of our wiretapped conversations to Nikolai Patrushev, Russia’s National Security Secretary. I am convinced that after this (Vulin’s arrival in Moscow, q.v.) Patrushev ordered the services to crack down on opposition politicians, first of all on Pivovarov and Kara-Murza. I am not a politician and I believe that is why I have not been targeted so far, although in today’s Russia anything can happen at any moment. Both of them were under strict surveillance, the services were monitoring virtually all their activities on the networks, so I say that it is obvious that Pivovarov was arrested because Vulin took the content of the wiretapped conversations to Nikolai Patrushev. And Vladimir Kara-Murza was arrested largely because of that. In Russia, this is how these things are done – if they get enough material to label you a traitor by their standards, they take you to court. The formal reason for Kara-Murza’s arrest was supposedly a meeting in Arizona, where he spoke about the war in Ukraine,” our interlocutor explained.

He also explained the monitoring during his stay in Belgrade.

“Curiosity did not leave me. I sat in a café on Kej oslobođenja and waited for the man “with glasses” to take his position and watch us. When he sat down at the next table, I walked towards him. I tried to explain to him in English that I knew who he was, that we were not enemies of his country, that we had spotted their surveillance team three days ago, that we had nothing to hide from them and to ask them to stop this show. I told him that if he was interested in finding out anything, he and his colleagues should sit down at our table and listen freely to what we were talking about. He understood everything, but he pretended not to understand me and not to speak English. I laughed at this, because it was quite strange to me that an intelligence officer could not know or speak English,” said Zahvatov.

Vulin’s unconvincing defence

The then Minister of Police (and now Director of the BIA) Aleksandar Vulin, after the newspaper “Nova” wrote about the wiretapping of Russian politicians, spoke out in his own way, calling Russian oppositionists “liars”.

“Any fool can have an opinion, just like any spy can present himself as a humanitarian or an activist,” Vulin said at the time.

However, the wiretapping story took on a controversial epilogue, given that the contents of the transcript of a meeting between the then Serbian Police Minister and Russian National Security Secretary Nikolai Patrushev were later revealed.

The transcript of the conversation states that Vulin and Patrushev spoke about the activities of their Working Group against Coloured Revolutions, and the Minister of Police explained to his Russian counterpart that he was aware of the activities of the organisation “Open Russia”, which he said had the support of the West and was “working against Russian interests”.

Patrushev also spoke at the meeting about the “highly destabilising potential of the Balkans”, which he said was externally caused, from the West.

The situation has worsened with the arrival of a new US administration headed by a man (Joseph Biden, President of the USA, ed.) who advocates the idea of “spreading democracy around the world”.

In the end, despite the fact that the Russian opposition was accompanied by members of the MUP, we did not get an epilogue, apart from the belated reaction of Vulin, who had the familiar scenario of “making noise and accusing someone of being a liar”, without presenting any concrete information about the case itself./Nova S/