War on Ukraine

Aug 1 2023 The Washington Post

Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine makes a mockery of law

In April Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison on treason charges — an accusation based entirely on his public statements about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Vladimir Kara-Murza delivered these remarks at his appeal hearing on July 31. As was expected, he lost the appeal.

Throughout this process — first in the Moscow City Court, now here in the Court of Appeal — a very strange feeling has never left me. Judicial procedures, by their nature, must be somehow connected with the law. But everything that has happened to me has nothing to do with the law; if anything, what I have witnessed is precisely the opposite.

The law — both Russian and international — prohibits the waging of aggressive war. But for more than 15 months, the man who calls himself the president of my country has been waging a brutal, unprovoked, aggressive war against a neighboring country: killing its citizens, bombing its cities, seizing its territories.