A Russian opposition activist who also holds British citizenship has been jailed for 25 years for treason and “discrediting” the armed forces after criticising Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The sentence handed down to Vladimir Kara-Murza, who likened his case to the show trials of the Stalin era, is the toughest to be imposed on a political opponent of Vladimir Putin since the start of the war, and signals a stark warning to other Kremlin critics.
Kara-Murza, 41, who was also a columnist for the Washington Post, was arrested in April 2022 after condemning the invasion of Ukraine but in October he was charged with treason, too.
The UK Foreign Office on Monday condemned the sentence as politically motivated and summoned the Russian ambassador, while the EU said it was “outrageously harsh”.
Deborah Bronnert, the British ambassador to Russia who attended the trial, described the case as “shocking”.
“A criminal case was opened against him for a brave protest against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” she said. “The British government expresses solidarity with Vladimir Kara-Murza and his family and demands his immediate release.”
The activist also lobbied western capitals to impose sanctions on individuals accused of human rights violations in Russia as part of the Magnitsky Act.
One of the people slapped with sanctions as a result of Kara-Murza’s campaigning was Sergei Podoprigorov, a judge who was subsequently appointed to preside over his treason trial.
According to Kara-Murza’s lawyers, his trial was the first to deploy Russia’s new definition of “treason”, which was expanded last July, the Kommersant newspaper reported.
Tatiana Stanovaya, senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said that the new definition meant that “any activity . . . such as publishing an article that could theoretically help foreign secret services better understand the vulnerabilities of Russia’s national security, is already a reason to open a criminal state treason case”.
Writing on her social media page, she added: “This puts any expert, journalist, official or even ordinary Russians in an extremely vulnerable position before the Russian secret services.”
Stanovaya said that Kara-Murza had caused “acute irritation” by lobbying for sanctions.
His sentencing, she said, served as “a warning to all anti-Putin activists — don’t come back or we’ll put you in jail”.
Kara-Murza was a close ally of Boris Nemtsov, a Putin critic who was assassinated in 2015. Kara-Murza himself survived two suspected poisonings in 2015 and 2017.
In his final statement to the court last week published in the Washington Post, Kara-Murza said the description of him as an “enemy of the state” echoed the show trials of the Stalin era.
“I was sure, after two decades spent in Russian politics, after all that I have seen and experienced, that nothing can surprise me anymore. I must admit that I was wrong,” he said.
“I subscribe to every word that I have spoken and every word of which I have been accused by this court.”
One of his lawyers, Maria Eismont, said that over the past year Kara-Murza had not been given an opportunity to call his children. She also raised concerns about the state of his health.
Additional reporting by Henry Foy in Brussels
