Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian journalist, author, and dissident who was sentenced to 25 years in jail for speaking out against the war on Ukraine. This article appeared in the Washington Post.

Vladimir Kara-Murza has prepared the following remarks for an upcoming appearance before a Moscow appeals court. In April,he was sentencedto 25 years in prison on treason charges — an accusation based entirely on his public statements about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“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…