Abroad Today, 08:36"Don’t say goodbye to me yet." Oppositionist Kara-Murza, sentenced to 25 years in Russia, publishes a letter from prison

In the letter published on Kara-Murza’s “Telegram” channel, the opposition member thanks his supporters.

“Don’t say goodbye to me yet,” he writes, because in Russia “reality tends to differ from what is written in official documents.”

“I really like the story that Naums Kleimans, director of the Cinema Museum, told about the deportation of his family to Siberia at the end of Stalin’s rule. When the deportees were driven out of the wagons into the snow and the commander began to read the verdict, one woman began to laugh out loud. Everyone thought she had lost her mind. When the commander left, she went up to the others and said, “What are you crying about? If he had said “sent to [cilvēka] life”, I would cry with you. But he said “exiled forever”. They think that they are the determiners of eternity. But you will see – this eternity will soon end,” says Kara-Murza.

The oppositionist also thanked his lawyers, defense witnesses and supporters who had gathered at the Moscow courthouse, as well as those who stand up for political prisoners at the international level.

Kara-Murza also thanked her family, including her grandmother, who was four years old when her father was shot for “calling for the overthrow of the Soviet regime” and whose husband was sent to the gulag on the same charge.

“Recently, I congratulated him on his 90th birthday with a letter from prison. A man as a mirror of an era,” writes Kara-Murza.

He expressed his greatest gratitude to his wife Yevgenia Kara-Murza, stating that “he would not have been able to go all this way” without her support.

“I love you. Everything will be fine,” he writes. “We will definitely meet again.”

The 41-year-old Kara-Murza was also accused of “treason” and of being associated with an “undesirable organization”.

He was sentenced to seven years for “military forgery”, three years for participating in the activities of an “undesirable organization” and 18 years for “treason”. He will have to spend his imprisonment in a colony with a strict regime.

In her last words, Kara-Murza emphasized last week that she does not back down from her political statements, including her condemnation of the war started by Russia.

“I will sign under every word I said, for which I am accused today,” said Kara-Murza, adding that he not only does not give up what he said, but is proud of it.

Immediately after the verdict was announced, it was already condemned by many leaders of the international community, who demanded the immediate release of Kara-Murza, who was sentenced to the longest prison sentence received by an oppositionist in the history of modern Russia.

Kara-Murza also has British citizenship, and London has already demanded his immediate release.

Kara-Murza is a close associate of the murdered opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in 2015 and the exiled Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

For years, Kara-Murza tried to convince the United States and European countries to subject Russian officials to individual sanctions, and he played a major role in the adoption of the so-called Magnitsky Law.

Under this law, US sanctions were directed against those Russian officials who were responsible for the death of lawyer Sergej Magnitsky in 2009 in a Moscow prison.

Kara-Murza was detained last April on charges of spreading “fake news” and “discrediting” the Russian army. The charges stemmed from a speech Kara-Murza gave to the US state legislature in Arizona in March.

Shortly after the repeated invasion of Ukraine, amendments to the criminal code entered into force in Russia, which provide for up to 15 years in prison for spreading “fake news” and “discrediting” the army.