Russia: Opposition leader Kara-Murza loses appeal against treason sentence

Vladimir Kara-Murza, a politician in the Russian opposition, was sentenced to 25 years in prison and lost his appeal on Monday, according to the official news agency RIA. Kara-Murza, who is dual-nationality Russian and British, was sentenced to 25 years in prison in April for treason and disseminating “false information” regarding Russia’s conflict in Ukraine. After the Kremlin pushed tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022, the 41-year-old is one of a select group of well-known opposition politicians who remained in Russia and continued to criticise President Vladimir Putin. Two months after the war started, Kara-Murza was detained and labelled a “foreign agent” on suspicion of disseminating false information about the armed forces. Hours after a CNN interview with him during which he said that Russia was being run by “a regime of murderers”. After making speeches about the conflict, including one to the Arizona House of Representatives in which he claimed that Putin was bombing Ukrainian homes, hospitals, and schools, he was eventually charged with treason. Although thousands of people have died in Ukraine, Moscow claims it does not intentionally target civilians. He contrasted the accusations made against him during his trial to the language employed by the secret police of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the 1930s, when Kara-Murza’s own grandfather was detained in a Gulag prison camp in eastern Russia. Boris Nemtsov, the leader of the Russian opposition, was shot and killed in the heart of Moscow in 2015. Kara-Murza was a close aide to Nemtsov. He said that the Russian secret services poisoned him twice, in 2015 and 2017, causing him to get dangerously ill. Both times, he went into a coma before waking up. The incidents’ involvement was denied by Russian authorities. According to his attorney, he has polyneuropathy, a nerve ailment brought on by the poisoning events, and is in poor health. (With agency inputs)