A Russian court yesterday sentenced prominent oppositionist and journalist VladÃmir Karà -Murzà to 25 years in prison accused, among other crimes, of treason. With no mercy, the judges accepted the request of the Prosecutor’s Office and handed down the harshest sentence in years against an opponent of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.
Karà -Murzà , who some time ago reported having suffered two poisonings that he attributed directly to the Kremlin (in 2015 and 2017), was arrested in April last year. In addition to the charge of treason, Moscow authorities charged him with denigrating the Russian military.
Russia passed a law criminalizing the spread of fake news about the armed forces in March 2022, shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the military into Ukraine on February 24 of that year. This law has served to punish those who have dared to publicly criticize the military actions in the neighboring country, whether ordinary citizens or recognized politicians and activists.
In prison there is, for example, the opposition Il·lià Iaixin, sentenced in December to 8.5 years, and the municipal deputy of Moscow Aleksei Górinov, to 7 years in July.
Vladimir Karà -Murzà , 41, was one of the few critics of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin who had not yet been convicted or exiled.
The journalist got involved in politics at a very young age, at 18, and became a close collaborator of Boris Nemtsov, deputy prime minister in the last government of Boris Yeltsin and one of the best-known opposition leaders to Putin, who was assassinated in 2015.
In his interventions abroad, especially in the United States, Europe and Canada, he called for the adoption of sanctions against Russian officials guilty of serious human rights violations.
For example, in the United States he defended the passage of the Magnitsky Act by the US Congress, a law that prosecutes Russians and foreigners accused of corruption and human rights violations. Passed in 2012, it was originally aimed at those involved in the prison killing of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009, after he uncovered a network of corruption.
The charges for discrediting the military stem from a speech Kara-Murza gave on March 15, 2022 before the Arizona House of Representatives, in the United States, in which she denounced Russian military intervention in Ukraine and the launching of “bombs on residential areas, hospitals and schools”.
He could have stayed in exile and avoided the subsequent trial, but he decided to return to try to change the situation from within.
He was arrested in April 2022 and, while in pre-trial detention, prosecutors added charges of treason against him. He also faced a third accusation: working for an organization classified by the Russian state as “undesirable”.
Karà -Murzà has denied any guilt. “Not only do I not regret all of this, but I am proud of it,” he said in his final turn on April 10 in a trial held behind closed doors. He assured that he “regrets nothing” and that he “loves Russia”, said his lawyer, Maria Eismont.
“I also know that a day will come when the darkness covering our country will dissipate (…), when those who instigated and started this war [in Ukraine] will be called criminals, not those who tried to stop it â€, declared the opponent in the trial.
International support for Karà -Murzà , recognized by Amnesty International as a “prisoner of conscience”, was not long in coming. The UN and the Government of the United Kingdom, a country of which he also holds citizenship, requested his immediate release. Germany stated through the spokeswoman of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Andrea Sasse, that “the repression in Russia is reaching shocking proportions”.
From Russia, the most recognized opposition leader, the imprisoned Aleksei Navalni, described the sentence as “unjust, illegal and fascist” in a message that was disseminated by his team. According to Navalni, this is a kind of “revenge” of the Russian justice system for having survived his poisoning attempts.
