Russian-American ballerina Ksenia Karelina has pleaded guilty to treason charges after she was arrested for donating money to a charity supporting Ukraine.
Russian prosecutors are seeking a 15-year sentence after the security services accused Ms Karelina of collecting money that was used to purchase tactical supplies for the Ukrainian army.
She was detained by authorities in Yekaterinburg, about 1,600km (1,000 miles) east of Moscow after a family visit in February.
The sentence comes one week after Russia and the West carried out the largest prisoner exchange since the Cold War, where 24 people jailed in seven different countries were exchanged.
Ms Karelina’s lawyer said the prosecutors’ request for a 15-year sentence in a penal colony was too severe as the defendant had cooperated with the investigation.
Mikhail Mushailov also said it was “impossible” for Ms Karelina to have been included in the recent prisoner exchange, because an exchange can only happen once the court verdict comes into force.
That’s a horrible take. Most people don’t care about whether things are legal, they care about whether things are morally right.
I’ll note that I don’t have a legal background, so the following is largely intuition.
Law is usually supposed to codify moral behavior. It’s a way to help different people talk about right/wrong and help them share moral concepts. So far, so good. However, not only does law fall short in terms of codifying moral behavior quite frequently, we also start from our morals and cross-check whether law aligns with those.
That sounds right at first, but you fail to realise that morality is not an objectively measurable unit. Whose morality should apply to everyone? Yours? Mine? The Russian ones? Why?