Vladimir Putin’s courts are stepping up repression

THE SENTENCING this week of Vladimir Kara-Murza, an opposition politician, to 25 years in jail shocked even those of Russia’s . Yan Rachinsky, the chair of Memorial, a human-rights group that was recently outlawed, described the length of the sentence as Stalinist. Mr Kara-Murza himself expressed surprise at how far the trial went beyond the norms of late Soviet dissident trials. “Things like this might have been present in the 1930s, not the 1970s,” he said.Mr Kara-Murza, a British-Russian national, was sentenced on an implausible mix of charges: state treason, disinformation and working for a banned “undesirable” organisation founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled former oligarch. His real crime is to speak against Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.