Outspoken Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza was jailed for a quarter of a century by a Moscow court on Monday, the harshest sentence of its kind since Russia invaded Ukraine, after being found guilty of treason and other offences he denied.
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.
State prosecutors, who had requested the court jail him for 25 years, had accused him of treason and of discrediting the Russian military after he criticised what Moscow calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine.
In a CNN interview broadcast hours before he was arrested, Kara-Murza had alleged that Russia was being run by a “regime of murderers”.—Agencies
