Editorial: The doubling of a dissident's jail term shows how Russia like China has no opposition

​​In 2010, leaked Wikileaks cables showed that American diplomats and other overseas observers considered Russia a corrupt kleptocracy run by an autocrat, Vladimir Putin.

Oligarchs, government and organised crime were bound together in a "virtual mafia state". Such an assessment of Moscow generated global headlines, but little more. In 2006 Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident who had exposed links between Putin and criminality, died after he was poisoned. Other critics of the thuggish president of Russia have met mysterious ends, and in 2018, Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent, and his daughter, were poisoned in an attack in Salisbury as a result of which a woman who had become inadvertently embroiled in the incident was killed.

These alone are heinous crimes by a gangster regime. In 2014 Russia seized Crimea in Ukraine to international protest but inaction. Then last year Putin invaded the rest of the country. The response of the western democracies even to that most aggressive of the dictator’s crimes has been inconsistent. America has provided by far the most help to Kyiv. The UK has been one of Ukraine's key backers. But everywhere there are political voices causing for 'talks', which in effect means letting Putin keep his ill-gotten gains.

Russia's opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was himself poisoned and almost killed, was last year jailed for nine years. Yesterday he has been given another decade behind bars for alleged extremism, after a secret trial in a penal colony. In Russia, like in China, there is no opposition. It is terrifying to think of a world in which democracy and a free press could be pushed back and suppressed. For all our problems in the UK we live in a relatively well-run country with exceptional levels of openness and we must do what we feasibly can to support such values.