Russian opponent Vladimir Kara-Mourza, sentenced to 25 years in prison for “treason” and for denouncing the military offensive in Ukraine, arrived this Sunday at a high-security penal colony in Omsk, Siberia, where he will serve his sentence .
According to the lawyer, Kara-Mourza, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s leading critics and a holder of British citizenship, was sentenced to a “particularly harsh” sentence in April, leading Western capitals to demand his release.
“Vladimir Kara-Mourza was taken to the high-security IK-6 penal colony in Omsk to serve his sentence,” his lawyer Vadim Prokhorov said on the social network Facebook.
According to Prokhorov, the opponent was “immediately placed in an isolation cell.”
Omsk, a city with over a million inhabitants, is located about 2,700 kilometers east of Moscow.
Prisoners serving long sentences in Russia’s prison system are often sent to remote towns and take weeks to get there, with stops at various prisons across the vast country.
“The journey from Moscow to Omsk took as much as three weeks in the 21st century,” Prokhorov joked, adding that the opponent was held for “several days” in an isolation cell in the city of Samara, central Russia.
Those close to Vladimir Kara-Mourza are concerned about the opponent’s fragile health as he suffers from a nerve disease called polyneuropathy, caused by two attempts to poison him.
Vladimir Kara-Mourza was found guilty of spreading “false information” about the Russian army and the military invasion of Ukraine, and of having ties to an “undesirable organization”, after a closed-door trial.
This is the harshest sentence handed down against a prominent Kremlin opponent in recent years.
Since the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine, almost all opposition members have been arrested or fled the country.
Thousands of ordinary Russians were also tried and detained for opposing the conflict, sometimes being sentenced to long prison terms.
Source: DN
