After Naval'nyj Putin condemns another enemy: 25 years of lager for Kara-Murza
The opponent considered a foreign agent, therefore a traitor to the state. A "Stalinist" trial. The judge was already sanctioned by the US. In the past Kara-Murza has escaped two poisoning attempts. Fears that the regime wants to eliminate him in prison.
Moscow (AsiaNews) - A Moscow court has sentenced Vladimir Putin's most prominent political opponent since Naval'nyj, the publicist and university professor Vladimir Kara-Murza, to 25 years in a hard-line prison.
Considered a 'foreign agent', the charge against him is 'betrayal' of the state for being a member of undesirable organisations. He was also banned from public activities, especially journalism, for seven years after serving his sentence.
The measure appears to be Stalinist in style, both in the way the investigation and trial was conducted and in the 'exemplary' outcome, intended to strike fear into any form of dissent in Russia. The court session was held behind closed doors, with a line of ambassadors from different countries in front of the building, without permission to enter.
The judge who presided over the hearing, Sergei Podoprigorov, could only be biased, as Kara-Murza's lawyers argued, because he was on the 'Magnitsky List', a list of those sanctioned for having participated in the persecution that led to the death in camps of Sergei Magnitsky, an opponent of Putin, in 2008.
He had justified himself by stating that he had been placed on the jury 'by chance, just because I was on duty that day', and in 2017 had applied to the US Treasury Department to be removed from the list.
In his last speech before the court, Kara-Murza said he was convinced that he "was a victim of persecution purely for political reasons, and I have nothing to regret", least of all his criticism of the war in Ukraine that earned him a conviction for discrediting the Armed Forces, one of the many counts that led to his sentencing.
"I subscribe to every word of those I uttered, which are attributed to me today as a crime". The activist did not ask to be acquitted, "I knew what I was up against, this is today in Russia the price for the courage not to remain silent".
Former president of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom in Russia, the politician was also a television journalist, who held regular broadcasts between 2019 and 2022, and had been among the initiators of the 'People's Freedom Party', as well as the democratic movement 'Solidarnost'.
He had been arrested a year ago, in a spectacular assault by special forces in black uniforms and masks, directly under his house in Moscow. At the time, the report also included a charge of resisting arrest, as 'the suspect had changed direction at the appearance of the security forces, accelerating his pace and trying to hide', instead of handing himself over directly to his torturers.
The incident that had most irritated the Kremlin leadership, and triggered the punitive operation, was Kara-Murza's speech on 15 March 2022 in a video conference before members of the House of Representatives of the US state of Arizona. The immediate arrest had been ordered to prevent the 'danger of flight' of the accused, who also possessed British and Northern Irish citizenship, and was the 'owner of financial means deposited in foreign banks'.
Already in 2015 and 2017, the opponent had been admitted to a clinic with symptoms of poisoning. The first time the diagnosis was 'acute renal failure', and he went to rehabilitate outside Russia, but then returned after a laboratory analysis in France certified the presence of poisonous substances in his blood.
The second time, kidney symptoms emerged in an even more severe form, so that the patient was put into a pharmacological coma, to be cured by haemodialysis. The current detention seems to be a repetition of attempts to prematurely eliminate Putin's fierce opponent, as is also the case with his associate Naval'nyj, the new heroes of dissent in Russia.
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