Russian Dissident Says He Was Traded Against His Will in Inmate Swap
Ilya Yashin, one of the Russian dissidents traded to the West in Thursday’s prisoner exchange for a group of Russian agents, cybercriminals and an assassin, said on Friday that he did not want his freedom if it meant leaving his country.
“I will never make peace with the role of an emigrant,” Mr. Yashin, 41, said at a news conference with other newly freed Russians in Bonn, Germany.
He described a statement he wrote before he was moved from his penal colony, insisting that he did not consent to be exchanged, which he said included the declaration, “The Russian Constitution bans sending a citizen of the Russian Federation abroad without his consent. As a Russian citizen, I confirm that I do not give permission to be sent outside of Russia.”
He said he was told that if he attempted to return, he would meet the same fate as Aleksei A. Navalny, the opposition leader who died in February in the Arctic penal colony where he was serving several sentences on what Western governments and human rights groups said were trumped-up charges.
Moreover, Mr. Yashin said, “They made it clear that my return would block any potential exchanges of any other political prisoners for the foreseeable future.” He said that there were many in far poorer health who should have taken his place in the exchange.
“It is unbearable to think that I am free because I was exchanged for a killer,” said Mr. Yashin, referring to Vadim Krasikov, a Russian convicted by a German court of murdering a former Chechen separatist fighter in central Berlin in 2019. After he was returned to Moscow, the Kremlin acknowledged that Mr. Krasikov was an operative of the F.S.B., one of the intelligence agencies that grew out of the Soviet K.G.B.
The dissidents at the news conference in Bonn, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Andrei Pivovarov and Mr. Yashin — some of Russian’s best-known critics of the government — expressed gratitude to the West for their freedom but underlined that they were forced out of their home country illegally, and none had requested it.
“Since my first days in prison, I have said I do not want to be included in any exchange,” Mr. Yashin said. “I viewed my time in prison not only as an antiwar struggle and a fight against the war of aggression unleashed by Putin, but as a struggle for my right to live in my country, to engage in independent politics in my country, for the right to say what I think in my own country.”
Mr. Yashin had condemned the Russian war against Ukraine and specifically the crimes committed by the Russian Army in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, in the first month of the full-scale invasion. That earned him an eight-and-a-half-year prison sentence for “spreading knowingly false information” about the Russian armed forces. Unlike many political prisoners in Russia — the human rights organization Memorial has counted almost 800 — he had prepared for a long prison term.
The newly released Russians who spoke in Bonn were still struggling to come to terms with their sudden freedom. That was especially true of Mr. Kara-Murza, who spent almost two-and-a-half years held in isolation cells, in contravention of Russian law.
“After spending a year in solitary confinement, I wasn’t sure I was still able to speak in any language,” Mr. Kara-Murza — who lived for years in Britain and the United States — said in immaculate English. “It was something out of this world to somehow be in an airport full of people. I don’t have enough words to express it.”
Later, he told an exiled Russian journalist that he felt like he was watching a movie when she asked him a question, because what had happened recently had not seemed real.
Mr. Kara-Murza, who survived two poisoning attempts and imprisonment, is 42 but looks older. During his incarceration, he lost about 40 pounds, according to one of his lawyers. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary this year for columns he wrote for The Washington Post about Mr. Putin’s Russia, where dissent is ruthlessly suppressed.
One of Russia’s most prominent dissidents, Mr. Kara-Murza was serving the longest sentence any political prisoner had received in modern Russian history — 25 years for treason after condemning the war in Ukraine.
“I was certain I was going to die in Putin’s prison,” he said. He said was unaware that he would be exchanged until Thursday morning, when he saw Mr. Yashin and Mr. Pivovarov, on the bus that eventually took them to the airport.
He, too, underscored the illegality of the exchange, saying “Normal procedure requires that in order to be released a prisoner has to petition for a pardon,” which none of the three men did.
He shared what he wanted to write when he was asked to sign a statement requesting a presidential pardon: “I said I don’t consider Putin to be the legitimate president of my country. I consider him to be a usurper and a murderer. I will not admit any guilt because I am not guilty of anything.”
The three men described the pressure put on them by prison administrators to request pardons, their journeys from penal colonies to Moscow, and then their flight to Ankara, Turkey, the site of the exchange.
Mr. Yashin said he had left prison wearing his black prison uniform jacket but without any of his belongings, except his toothbrush and toothpaste. Mr. Kara-Murza joked that Mr. Yashin was lucky, because his own uniform had been confiscated and he had left wearing lounge pants which he had worn as long underwear during the subzero Siberian winters, an undershirt and rubber slippers.
“The guard was surprised I didn’t have any civilian clothes, and I asked him what I would need them for, to go to the theater?” Mr. Kara-Murza joked.
All three men expressed their gratitude at seeing a supportive crowd. Mr. Kara-Murza diplomatically thanked Germany, the United States and Britain for helping secure their freedom.
“We know this was not a simple decision for the German government,” he said, referring to the release of Mr. Krasikov. “Easy decisions are only possible in an autocracy.”
He said the F.S.B. officer who accompanied him on the plane to Ankara told him to look out the window, because it would be the last time he would see his homeland.
“I told him, ‘I am a historian by education, and I don’t only feel and believe, but I know that I will be back in my home country — and it will be much sooner than you think.”
Alina Lobzina contributed reporting from London.
#Russian #Dissident #Traded #Inmate #Swap