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Prominent Russian political prisoners, released on Thursday in the largest swap of its kind since the cold war, called for the many hundreds of prisoners of conscience still in Russia to be freed.
Kremlin critic Ilya Yashin, British-Russian journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza and politician Andrei Pivovarov reached Germany from prisons across Russia this week and thanked Germany and the US for their efforts.
Kara-Murza said it felt “surreal” to suddenly be free. “I feel like I am watching a movie on some big screen because just a week ago I was sitting in a one-person cell in Siberia.”
The three used a conference in Bonn on Friday to insist that many ordinary Russians oppose the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and many protesters remain in jail.
“I have a heavy weight on my soul . . . because over a thousand people remain in prisons in Russia,” said Yashin, who was sentenced in 2022 to eight years and six months in prison for opposing the war.
“Not that many people were released, just 16, and their lives were saved,” Pivovarov said. But he said the exchanges would give those still in jail “a chance to dream”.
“It will give people hope,” he said.
Yashin, however, said that though he was happy to be reunited with friends and colleagues, he had actively objected to being freed in an exchange. He believed his role as a politician was to remain in Russia regardless of the personal cost.
“From day one, I said publicly I was not ready to be exchanged, I said: don’t add me to any exchange lists,” Yashin said, explaining he was transported against his will. “I fought to the last day for my right to stay in Russia.”
He said on the day before he was exchanged, he wrote to prison authorities refusing to be sent out of the country.
The prisoners’ release, together with Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former US Marine Paul Whelan, was secured as part of an exchange in Ankara, Turkey, and involved 26 prisoners in total and seven countries. It was the culmination of months of painstaking diplomacy that also drew in Germany, Norway, Poland and Slovenia.
Gershkovich, Whelan and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reporter Alsu Kurmasheva, a US-Russian dual citizen arrested last year, landed in Washington late on Thursday while Russian and German nationals were brought to Cologne.
In return, 10 people, including some who had been arrested by Norway, Poland and Slovenia for crimes such as espionage, were returned to Russia.
“I understand the very difficult ethical dilemma faced by Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz and others,” Yashin said, talking about the German leader’s decision to return Vadim Krasikov to Moscow.
Krasikov is a hitman convicted of murder in broad daylight in Berlin in 2021, whom the Kremlin confirmed on Friday had been employed by Russia’s FSB security service.
Kara-Murza said Germany’s decision followed a tradition that harked back to the release of novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn during the cold war.
“On the landing strip in Ankara yesterday, this honourable tradition was continued,” he said. “We recognise this wasn’t an easy decision for Germany. But for democratic systems the highest value is human life.”
“Yesterday, 16 lives were saved. I don’t think there’s anything more important in the world,” Kara-Murza said.
Both Pivovarov and Kara-Murza called on the west to hear the voices of those inside Russia who opposed the war.
“Hundreds of people remain in our country sitting in prison purely for their political views,” said Kara-Murza, who faced 25 years in prison on treason charges after his arrest in 2022.
“The Kremlin’s propaganda wants to make you believe that everyone in Russia supports the Putin regime and the war. It’s a lie.”
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