Kara-Murza reserved his bitterest comments for the West. He and Nemtsov, a deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, had spent hours with policy makers explaining Putin’s intentions. Their thesis: internal repression ends in external aggression, inevitably. “We tried to warn the West what this man was about. He brought back the Soviet anthem in 2000, destroyed media and elections, invaded Georgia, and stole Crimea. Why did the West do nothing? He was going to invade Ukraine from the beginning,” he said. “I’m a historian. This is the only way the appeasement of dictators goes.”
