Putin critic and Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza given 25-year prison sentence

Moscow: A court in Moscow on Monday convicted a top Kremlin foe on charges of treason and denigrating the Russian military and sentenced him to 25 years in prison.

Kara-Murza, 41, a father of three and an opposition politician who holds Russian and British passports, spent years speaking out against President Vladimir Putin and lobbied Western governments to impose sanctions on Russia and individual Russians for purported human rights violations.

Kara-Murza is a prominent opposition activist who twice survived poisonings he blamed on the Kremlin, has been behind bars since his arrest a year ago. He has rejected the charges against him as political and likened the judicial proceedings against him to the show trials during the rule of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

The charges against Kara-Murza stem from his 15 March speech to the Arizona House of Representatives in which he denounced Russia’s military action in Ukraine. Investigators added the treason charges while he was in custody.

Russia adopted a law criminalizing spreading “false information” about its military shortly after it sent troops into Ukraine on 24 February, 2022. Authorities have used the law to stifle criticism of what the Kremlin calls “a special military operation.”

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