The Moscow City Court on Monday sentenced Vladimir Kara-Murza, a prominent critic of President Vladimir V. Putin, to 25 years in a high-security penal colony after convicting him of treason over his criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an unusually harsh sentence that drew international condemnation.
Mr. Kara-Murza’s supporters said the length of the sentence evoked memories of Stalin’s terror, and the verdict will likely send a chilling message to remaining anti-Kremlin activists in Russia and beyond as the Kremlin continues to clamp down on dissent over the war in Ukraine.
Many Russian political activists have been prosecuted since the invasion, including Ilya Yashin, who was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison last year on charges of “spreading false information” about Russia’s war in Ukraine — but Mr. Kara-Murza’s sentence was the longest yet. Ivan Pavlov, an acclaimed Russian human rights lawyer, called it “unprecedented,” saying that even murderers received shorter prison terms in Russia.
“It is a terrifying but also very high assessment of his work as a politician and a citizen,” Maria Eismont, one of Mr. Kara-Murza’s lawyers, said outside of the court, according to Sota, a Russian news outlet. She said the verdict would be appealed.
Mr. Kara-Murza’s mother, Yelena Gordon, told Sota after the hearing that she felt like “she woke up in a Kafka novel.”
“We live in 2023, in the 21st century, what is this, what is happening,” she told Sota.
An activist, historian and journalist, Mr. Kara-Murza, 41, has for years been one of the most uncompromising voices against Mr. Putin and had long drawn the Kremlin’s ire, surviving what he characterized several years ago as two state-sponsored attempts to poison him.
Shortly after Mr. Putin ordered troops into Ukraine in February 2022, Mr. Kara-Murza, who contributes to the opinion section of The Washington Post, gave a number of speeches in the United States and Europe strongly condemning the invasion.
Though many supporters advised him not to come back to Russia, Mr. Kara-Murza continued to work in the country. He was detained there last April while on a trip to Moscow and accused of disobeying police orders. He was sentenced to administrative arrest, during which the authorities charged him with spreading “fake” information about the Russian Army. He was later charged with taking part in an “undesirable organization” and treason. The verdict on Monday combined all of the charges into one sentence.
The trial, which human-rights organizations condemned, took place behind closed doors. Neither the prosecutors nor the investigators presented any evidence in public that would support the treason charge. Vadim Prokhorov, Mr. Kara-Murza’s lawyer, said in a post on Facebook in October that the treason charge related to public statements made in the United States and Europe which criticized the Kremlin.
On Monday, the United Nations human rights office decried Mr. Kara-Murza’s sentencing as “a blow to the rule of law,” while Hugh Williamson, the Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, called it “a travesty of justice.”
The U.S. State Department condemned the sentence and said Mr. Kara-Murza was “yet another target of the Russian government’s escalating campaign of repression.” Britain’s Foreign Office said it had summoned the Russian ambassador in London to protest what it described as a “politically motivated” conviction that runs “contrary to Russia’s international obligations on human rights, including the right to a fair trial.” In March, the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned three individuals, including a judge and an investigator, involved in prosecuting Mr. Kara-Murza.
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman refused to comment on the sentence.
During pretrial detention, Mr. Kara-Murza, a Russian-British dual national, said that he had been denied the right to call his family and his health began to deteriorate rapidly.
In his final address to the court before the verdict last week, Mr. Kara-Murza likened the current climate in Russia to the terror of the Stalin era.
“The day will come when the darkness over our country will dissipate,” he told a Moscow courtroom. “When black will be called black, and white will be called white; when at the official level, it will be recognized that two times two is still four; when a war will be called a war, and a usurper a usurper.”
Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.
