A Russian court mercilessly sentenced prominent opposition figure and journalist Vladimir Kará-Murzá to 25 years in prison on Monday, accused among other crimes of treason. It is the harshest sentence in years against an opponent of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.
Kará-Murzá, who in the past denounced having suffered two poisonings that he directly attributed to Russian power (in 2015 and 2017), was arrested in April of last year. In addition to the treason charge, the Moscow authorities charged him with denigrating the Russian army.
Russia introduced a law criminalizing the spread of false news about the Armed Forces in March 2022, shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the army to enter Ukraine on February 24 of that year. Said law has served to punish those who have dared to publicly criticize the military actions in the neighboring country, whether they are ordinary citizens or well-known politicians and activists.
In prison there are, for example, the opposition member Iliá Yashin, sentenced in December of last year to 8.5 years; and the municipal deputy of Moscow Alexéi Górinov, to 7 years in July.
Vladimir Kará-Murzá, 41, was one of the few critics of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin who had not yet been sentenced or gone into exile.
In the past, he was a close associate of Boris Nemtsov, deputy prime minister in the last government of Boris Yeltsin and one of the best-known opposition leaders to Putin, assassinated in 2015.
The charges against Kará-Murza stem from a speech he delivered on March 15, 2022, before the Arizona House of Representatives, in the United States, in which he denounced Russian military intervention in Ukraine.
Later, once he was already in custody, prosecutors added the treason charge. He also faced a third accusation: working for an organization described by the Russian state as “undesirable”, Open Russia of the former oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now in exile and turned opponent of Putin.
According to the court, he will have to spend his sentence in a severe regime penal colony, which means that he will be under very strict conditions of confinement. The judges accepted, in this way, the request of the prosecution and issued the toughest sentence in recent years against an opponent.
Kará-Murzá has refused to admit any guilt. In his last word in a trial that was held behind closed doors, on April 10, he assured that he felt “proud” of his political commitment. “Not only do I not regret all this, but I am proud of it,” he said in comments published by journalist Alexei Venediktov.
He assured that he “does not regret anything” and that he “loves Russia,” said his lawyer MarÃa Eismont.
“I also know that there will come a day when the darkness that covers our country will be dispelled (…) when those who instigated and started this war (in Ukraine) will be called criminals, not those who tried to stop it,” said the opponent.
Eismont announced that his client is going to appeal the sentence and denounced “serious violations of procedure” during the trial.
