The terrible choice facing Russia’s opposition – stay, or go?

There was a time before the invasion of Ukraine when even the Kremlin’s opponents would talk of living in ‘vegetarian’ times. Before 2022, independent news organisations like Dozhd TV, the New Times and Novaya Gazeta were marginalised but not banned. Public protest was punished, but for the most part with sentences in days and months, not years or decades. Even Alexei Navalny, the opposition’s highest profile leader, received a highly unusual suspended sentence after his conviction on trumped-up fraud charges in 2013. He remained free to goad the Kremlin with videos detailing massive corruption and run candidates in local elections until his poisoning by Russian secret police in August 2020.

Times have changed. Earlier this month activist Vladimir Kara-Murza was convicted of treason and sentenced to a staggering 25 years in jail.