TALLINN – When Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza was suddenly moved to a detention center in Moscow from a Siberian prison, he thought he was being taken there to be shot. Opposition activist Ilya Yashin said he was warned by a security operative that he would die in prison if he returned to Russia.
Neither was told they were being freed in a massive prisoner exchange with the West — the largest since the Cold War — when they were put on a bus to the airport Thursday, some still in prison garb.
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“It is very difficult to shake (the feeling) of absolute surrealism of what is happening,” Kara-Murza, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who had been serving 25 years in prison, told a news conference Friday in the German city of Bonn.
In their first public appearance since their release a day earlier, President Vladimir Putin's foes vowed to keep fighting for a free and democratic Russia they could one day return to.
They also talked about how their newly found freedom left a bittersweet aftertaste as they were effectively expelled from their own country, where hundreds of other political prisoners continued to languish behind bars.
“I’m not viewing what happened to me ... as an exchange. I’m viewing it as an expulsion from Russia, an illegal expulsion from Russia against my will. And I’ll say frankly, as it is: The thing I want the most right now is to go home,” said Yashin, who had been sentenced to 8 1/2 years for criticism of the Ukraine war.
He and Kara-Murza both told reporters no one asked them if they consented to the swap, and emphasized they refused to request a pardon from Putin — a formality they said prison officials had insisted upon.
Still, Kara-Murza stressed that such prisoner swaps are, in effect, “the saving of people's lives.” The death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison on February underscores that “very terribly,” he said.
Kara-Murza, Yashin and opposition figure Andre Pivovarov were among 16 prisoners that Russia and its ally Belarus released on Thursday — Americans, Germans and Russian dissidents, most of whom were imprisoned on charges widely seen as politically motivated.
The historic trade was in the works for months and unfolded despite relations between Washington and Moscow being at their lowest point since the Cold War after Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Those released included journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, who were greeted by their families and President Joe Biden when they arrived in Maryland on Thursday night.
Moscow in return got eight Russians jailed in the West for spying, hacking computers and even a brazen daylight murder. The Kremlin confirmed on Friday that some of them were its security and intelligence officers.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday that Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin who was serving a life sentence in Germany for the 2019 killing of a former Chechen fighter in a Berlin park, is an officer of the Federal Security Service, or FSB — a fact reported in the West even as Moscow denied state involvement.
He also said Krasikov once served in the FSB’s special forces Alpha unit, along with some of Putin’s bodyguards.
“Naturally, they also greeted each other yesterday when they saw each other,” Peskov said, underscoring Putin’s determination to include Krasikov in the swap. Earlier this year, Putin stopped short of identifying Krasikov, but referenced a “patriot” imprisoned in a “U.S.-allied country” for “liquidating a bandit” who had killed Russian soldiers during fighting in the Caucasus.
Peskov also confirmed that a couple released in Slovenia — Artem and Anna Dultsev — were undercover intelligence officers. Posing as Argentine expats, they used Ljubljana as their base since 2017 to relay Moscow's orders to other sleeper agents and were arrested on espionage charges in 2022.
Yashin said at the news conference in Bonn that “it is hard to realize that you have been released because a murderer has been released. It is difficult, it is very emotionally difficult."
It's also difficult, he said, because there are other Russians still behind bars.
Still, he vowed to continue the fight against Putin's rule — despite the risks.
“When we were flying with FSB officers to Ankara, one FSB officer turned to Vladimir and me and said: ‘Well, don’t get too carried away there, because Krasikov might come back for you,'" — a comment he said sent “chills” through his spine.
Kara-Murza and Pivovarov echoed Yashin's resolve.
“My friends and I will use all our strength so that our country could become free and democratic, and all those people who are behind bars are freed,“ said Pivovarov, who had been serving a four-year prison term.
Kara-Murza added that there are still “hundreds of people in prison solely for their political views, and more and more are on the lists of political prisoners.”
“These are our fellow citizens who, like all of us, oppose the cruel, criminal, aggressive war that the Putin regime unleashed against Ukraine,” he said.
The Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights group Memorial said Friday that 766 people it has designated as political prisoners remain behind bars in Russia.
To supporters and relatives of those released, the swap also came as a surprise.
Pivovarov's wife, Tatyana Usmanova, told The Associated Press on Friday that when she learned he had disappeared from his prison in northern Russia, she imagined both bad and good outcomes.
She started to suspect a possible swap when reports appeared about other prisoners missing from their facilities, she said, but only felt “good and clear” about an exchange when she heard his voice on the phone Thursday, telling her to fly to Germany.
Artist and musician Sasha Skochilenko, convicted last year of an anti-war protest, disappeared Monday night from a detention center in St. Petersburg, her partner Sophya Subbotina said on Telegram. Subbotina told AP on Tuesday that “Sasha simply disappeared and we don't know where she is.” Prison officials said she probably was in Moscow.
Subbotina rushed to Moscow to check detentions centers but couldn't find Skochilenko, who finally called her on Thursday from Ankara, Turkey, where the swap took place. She said she had not known she was part of the exchange until it was underway, Subbotina added in remarks to the Russian news outlet Bumaga.
Oleg Orlov, the 71-year-old co-chair of the human rights group Memorial who was also released in the swap, called his wife, Tatyana Kasatkina, from Germany on Friday, and she said he “still hasn't processed that he ended up being so far from Russia,” the group quoted her as saying.
Orlov recounted to her that no one asked for his consent or explained why he was being moved from a detention center, and he only realized he was part of a swap when he got on a bus to the airport. According to Memorial, Orlov also didn't sign a request for presidential pardon.