MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza against his 25-year jail sentence on treason and other charges, according to a Reuters reporter at the court on Tuesday.
Moscow-born Kara-Murza, who has both Russian and British passports, has repeatedly condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine, criticised President Vladimir Putin, and lobbied for Western sanctions against Moscow.
His quarter of a century jail term – handed down last year after what he described as a show trial like those under Josef Stalin in the 1930s – was the harshest of its kind since Russia sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in 2022.
The 42-year-old opposition politician was arrested two months after the war began, accused of spreading false information about the armed forces and declared a “foreign agent”.
His detention came hours after CNN broadcast an interview with him in which he said Russia was run by “a regime of murderers”.
The father of three was later charged with treason over speeches he had made about the war, including one to the Arizona House of Representatives in March 2022 in which he said Putin was bombing Ukrainian homes, hospitals and schools.
Moscow says it does not deliberately target civilians, but thousands have been killed in Ukraine.
State prosecutors accused Kara-Murza of spreading “knowingly false information” about the army’s conduct in what Moscow calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine.
His wife Evgenia has voiced fears for his life following the death of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s best-known opposition figure, in an Arctic penal colony in February.
Kara-Murza argued in his appeal that he had committed no crime and was convicted solely for exercising his right to free speech by expressing public opposition to Putin and the war.
“This whole case is based on the denial of the very concepts of law, justice, and legality,” Kara-Murza said in a written submission to the court.
“But it is also based on a crude, cynical forgery — an attempt to equate criticism of the authorities with harm to the country; to present opposition activity as ‘treason’. But there is nothing new in this, either; it is what every dictatorship does.”
The text was published last month as an opinion piece in the Washington Post, for which Kara-Murza writes articles from prison. This month he was awarded a prestigious Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
(Reporting by Reuters, writing by Mark Trevelyan and Lucy Papachristou, Editing by Andrew Osborn)
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