This Monday, a Moscow court sentenced Vladimir Kara-Murza, declared critic of the Kremlin, to a quarter of a century in jail. This is the toughest prison sentence since Russia invaded Ukraineafter convicting him of treason and other crimes that he denied.
Kara-Murza, 41, the father of three and an opposition politician with Russian and British passports, spent years denouncing the President Vladimir Putin and pressing Western governments to impose sanctions on Russia and individual Russians for alleged human rights violations.
State prosecutors, who had asked the court to jail him for 25 years, had accused him of treason and discrediting the Russian military after he criticized what Moscow calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine. In a CNN interview Issued hours before his arrest, Kara-Murza had claimed that Russia was run by a “regime of assassins.”
In his final statement in court last week, Kara-Murza had compared his own trial, held behind closed doors, to the “show trials” of Josef Stalin in the 1930s and had refused to ask the court to acquit him. , stating that he stood his ground and was proud of everything he had said, Reuters reported.
“Criminals are supposed to regret what they have done. I, on the other hand, am in jail for my political opinions. I also know that the day will come when the darkness over our country will dissipate», he had said. Likewise, he had taken advantage of speeches in USA and in all Europa to accuse Moscow of bombing civilian targets in Ukraine, a charge the Kremlin has denied.