Vladimir Kara-Murza
IMR Senior Policy Advisor
On February 25th, Russia’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper published an article entitled “Russian Landing Party in Washington” by Edward Lozansky. The article contains the following passage:
“The gathering began on February 21st with preparatory bombardment at the Heritage Foundation, where opposition activist, journalist, and now en employee of the Institute of Modern Russia (whose president is Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s son Pavel), Vladimir Kara-Murza, made his modest contribution to the discussion of recommendations to the US president. Among these were a speedy deployment of missile defense systems in Europe; no cuts to the military budget; the achievement of full superiority of US space, ground, air and naval forces in Europe and Eurasia. It is necessary to force Russia to buy American meat and expand military and economic cooperation with Eurasian countries: Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (it seems that Georgia has been given up on.)”
Every single word attributed to me in the above-quoted passage is a lie, which is easily proven by the video recording of the event (including the question-and-answer session) on the Heritage Foundation’s website.
Accordingly, I expect Mr. Lozansky and Nezavisimaya Gazeta to issue a public retraction of the false information contained in “Russian Landing Party in Washington.”
N.B. This is not the first story of its kind. In October 2011, the online publication Infox.ru published an article entitled “Kasparov Urged War Against Russia” based on the misquoting of remarks by the opposition politician at the same Heritage Foundation. Garry Kasparov sued for libel and achieved an out-of-court settlement with Infox.ru, which had to issue a public apology.
