HOSTILE STATE
Shocking moment female Brit diplomat is attacked by pro-Putin stooges who filmed horror tirade at Moscow restaurant
The pro-Kremlin activists accused the British aide of 'backing Ukrainian terrorism'
SHOCKING footage shows a female British diplomat being verbally abused at a restaurant over the UK's support of Ukraine.
The aide to the British ambassador in Russia was sitting with a group of friends at a venue in Moscow when pro-Putin stooges unleashed a tirade of anger at her.
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A clip, filmed by the furious pro-Kremlin activists, shows the woman remaining calm and not responding to the harassment.
It is unclear how the activists knew who she was and where she would be at that exact time.
One of the activists can be heard shouting: "We recognise you. You are a British diplomat.
"Doesn't your conscience bother you that you are backing Ukrainian terrorism?"
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Another activist could be heard saying: "Your missiles are flying towards our children. Towards Russia.
"Our children have no future because of you."
It is understood the video was taken at a Latin-American restaurant in Moscow on Friday.
The Sun has chosen not to identify the aide over concerns for her safety.
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Meanwhile, a Brit jailed in Russia has been moved to a hellish new Siberian prison and placed in solitary confinement for not standing up fast enough.
The UK is "deeply concerned" over the fate of Vladimir Kara-Murza, 42, who was sentenced to 25 years last April by Vladimir Putin's cronies after opposing the Ukraine war.
Kara-Murza, who also holds a Russian passport and worked as an opposition politician in Moscow, vanished from his prison cell in Omsk, Siberia on Monday.
Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron said he was "deeply concerned" over the fate of the dissident who also suffers from a nerve disorder after two poisonings he blames on the Kremlin.
However, Kara-Murza's wife, Evgenia, revealed on Tuesday he had been transferred to a new prison and immediately placed in a punishment block.
He said his only crime was not standing up in time when the guard commanded him to "rise" and he was slammed with a "malicious violation".
The Cambridge graduate will now spend four months in painful solitary confinement, according to the letter he wrote to his lawyer published by Evgenia.
He wrote ironically that the point of the transfer was "so that life doesn't seem like honey".
Kara-Murza had publicly criticised Putin since the tyrant came to power in 2000 and was a close aide to opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in central Moscow in 2015.
Putin enemies jailed in Russia
MAD Vlad is not a man who likes to be challenged.
Those who dare to challenge the Kremlin kingpin or discredit his regime have ended up falling out of windows, shot dead in the street or booted off to hellish gulags in Siberia.
The latter is an easy option for paranoid Putin - sentence his opponents to decades behind bars. Out of sight, out of mind.
Here is a list of President Putin's prominent enemies and critics - or just those who dared to criticise his war in Ukraine - who have been jailed in recent years:
Alexei Navalny
Putin's best-known opponent Navalny, 47, has been locked up for almost three decades on trumped up charges of treason, which he denies.
He was poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet-made nerve agent, on a trip to Siberia in 2020 and later arrested in 2021 on charges of embezzlement which his supporters call punishment for challenging the Kremlin.
He was later charged with high treason and had 19 years added to his nine-year-sentence, which he is serving in one of Russia's toughest Arctic prisons, known as the 'Polar Wolf' colony.
Human rights groups have long called Navalny's imprisonment 'politically motivated'.
Vladimir Kara-Murza
The British citizen, Russian dissident and opposition politician was arrested in April, 2022 after criticising Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The long-term Putin critic was sentenced to 25 years in April, 2023 - the harshest punishment of its kind since the war began.
Ilya Yashin
Yet another opposition politician who was sent to rot behind bars.
Yashin was sentenced to eight and a half years in December, 2022 on charges of spreading 'false information' about the army.
He was tried over a YouTube video in which he discussed evidence regarding Russian atrocities in the Ukrainian village in Bucha, near Kyiv.
Andrei Pivovarov
Pivovarov led a now-defunct activist organisation called Open Russia, which was forced to shut down after a crackdown in May, 2021.
He was jailed for four years in July, 2022 for leading the so-called 'undesirable organisation'.
Alexei Gorinov
A smaller player than the others, Gorinov was a Moscow district councillor whose only crime was to speak out about the war once at a council meeting.
He was jailed for seven years in July, 2022 after allegedly spreading 'lies' about the Russian armed forces.
He told his constituents that children were 'dying every day' in Ukraine.
Gorinov was the first person to be jailed under Putin's sweeping censorship laws passed eight days after the war.
Alexei Moskalyov
Next is a man who was investigated by Putin's spooks after his 12-year-old daughter drew an anti-war picture at school in 2022.
He was then alleged to have discredited the armed forces on his own social media and sentenced to two years in jail - a vicious punishment likely intended as a warning to others.
He fled the country on the eve of the verdict but was captured in Belarus and extradited back to Russia.
Ivan Safronov
Safronov was a defence reporter who later became an adviser to the head of Russia's space agency.
He was arrested in 2020 and sentenced to 22 years in jail over claims he disclosed state secrets - a charge that he denies, stating all the information was already in the public domain.
Critics have claimed his imprisonment was a bold warning to others as Putin cracked down on media freedoms.
He had vocally condemned Russia's war in Ukraine and lobbied for Western sanctions against Moscow.
He was arrested only weeks after the invasion and hours after CNN broadcast an interview with him in which he said Russia was run by "a regime of murderers".
Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years last April on treason and other charges that he denied, comparing the case against him to a Stalinist show trial.
He wrote: “So now I’m in the IK-7 (penal colony), also in Omsk...It is a special regime colony, there is a special restricted housing unit facility for ‘repeat violators’ like me."
"I’m in solitary confinement, of course,” he wrote, adding that he was “fine,” had enough food and it was warm in the facility.
More than 160 Russian citizens have been imprisoned for opposing the war, according to human rights group OVD-Info - however Kara-Murza's is the harshest so far.
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A total of 19,854 Russians have been arrested between February 24, 2022, when the war began, and January 28, 2024, for speaking out or demonstrating against the invasion.
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