Sawt Falasteen - Prosecutor requests 25 years in jail for Kremlin critic Kara-Murza

The high-profile trial is the latest in a string of cases against opposition voices in Russia in a crackdown that has intensified since President Vladimir Putin sent troops to Ukraine last year.

"Yes, I confirm... 25 years of imprisonment" were requested, lawyer Vadim Prokhorov told AFP after a closed-door hearing.

Kara-Murza, 41, is accused of high treason, spreading "false" information about the Russian army and being affiliated with an "undesirable organisation".

The opposition activist suffers from a nerve condition called polyneuropathy which his lawyers say was due to two poisoning attempts in 2015 and 2017.

The condition has worsened in prison, and he was too unwell to attend some of his hearings. He was however present at the hearing on Thursday, his other lawyer, Maria Eismont, told AFP.

Kara-Murza was detained in April last year on charges of disseminating what the authorities deem to be "fake news" about the Russian army.

That case was launched over his address about Russia's Ukraine offensive to members of the lower house of the Arizona Legislature last March.

In August 2022, Kara-Murza was accused of being affiliated with an "undesirable organisation" for participating in a conference in support of political prisoners.

In October he was charged with treason over remarks critical of Moscow made at three public events abroad, his lawyer told the state-run TASS news agency.

- Return to 'Stalinist times' -

Prokhorov, his lawyer, said at the start of Kara-Murza's trial that authorities wanted to settle the case at "light-speed pace".

"We have returned to Stalinist times. To enormous Stalinist sentences," he said at the time, referring to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

A Russian citizen by birth, Kara-Murza received British citizenship after moving to the United Kingdom with his mother when he was 15.

The Western-educated journalist was a close associate of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead near the Kremlin in 2015, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oligarch turned Putin critic.

Kara-Murza says he was poisoned twice -- in 2015 and 2017 -- because of his political activities, but he continued to spend long periods of time in Russia.

In October 2022, Kara-Murza was awarded the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

Almost all of Putin's best-known political opponents have either fled the country or are in jail.

Putin's vocal domestic critic Alexei Navalny was arrested in January 2021 upon returning from Germany, where he was recovering from a poison attack that he blamed on the Kremlin.

In December opposition politician Ilya Yashin was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for spreading "false information" about Russia's offensive in Ukraine.

G.AbuHamad--SF-PST