A court in Moscow on Monday sentenced Vladimir Kara-Murza, a prominent critic of President Vladimir V. Putin, to 25 years in prison after finding him guilty of treason over his criticism of Russia’s war in Ukraine and of the Kremlin’s repression of dissent.
Kara-Murza’s supporters said the length of the sentence evokes memories of Stalin’s terror, and the verdict will likely send a chilling message to remaining anti-Kremlin activists in Russia and beyond.
“It is a terrifying but also very high assessment of his work as a politician and a citizen,” Maria Eismont, one of Kara-Murza’s lawyers, said outside of the court, according to Sota, a Russian news outlet.
An activist, historian and journalist, Kara-Murza, 41, has for years been one of the most uncompromising voices against Putin and had long drawn the Kremlin’s ire, surviving what he characterized several years ago as two state-sponsored attempts to poison him. Shortly after Putin ordered troops to invade Ukraine in February 2022, Kara-Murza gave a number of speeches in the US and Europe strongly condemning the invasion.
He was detained last April in Moscow for disobeying police orders and sentenced to administrative arrest, during which the authorities piled on new charges: spreading “fake” information about the Russian Army, taking part in an “undesirable organisation” and treason.
The verdict on Monday combined all of the charges into one sentence.
New York Times News Service
