Russian dissidents freed as part of a prisoner swap between Moscow and the West this week shared their mixed feelings on Friday about the deal at a news conference in Germany.
The exchange represented a “difficult dilemma”, Russian liberal opposition politician Ilya Yashin told journalists.
“It encourages Putin to take more hostages,” said Yashin, who had been serving a jail sentence for denouncing Moscow’s Ukraine offensive.
Yashin had said in the past that he did not want to be exchanged, arguing that the voice of a Kremlin critic was more powerful in Russia than outside.
The 41-year-old said he had received “several tens of thousands” of letters in prison, insisting that that was “not an exaggeration”.
“It was my source of strength. I’d receive these letters and I’d recharge my batteries, my health and my emotions. It helped me to survive every day,” he said.
Jailed US journalist Evan Gershkovich and a Russian agent jailed for a Berlin murder were among two dozen prisoners freed on Thursday in the biggest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War.
In total, 10 Russians – including two minors – were exchanged for 16 Westerners and Russians imprisoned in Russia and Belarus, including five German nationals.
Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza, also freed in the swap, said the deal had saved “16 human lives”.
Kara-Murza, 42, who was released from a 25-year prison sentence, said many Russians were “opposed to (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s war in Ukraine”.
Until Thursday, the day he was released, he had been certain he would die in a Russian jail, he added.
In two years he had been allowed to speak to his wife on the phone only once and to his children twice, he said.
“I did not believe I would ever see my wife again. I did not believe I’d ever see my family again and this feels really surreal, this feels like a film,” he said.
However, the exchange was a “drop in the ocean because so many innocent people who’ve never committed a crime in their life are being held in torturous conditions” in Russia, he added.
The freed dissidents also paid tribute to leading Putin opponent Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison in February.
The White House on Thursday revealed that Navalny had been set to be included in the deal before his death.
Opposition activist Andrei Pivovarov, 42, said Navalny had become “accustomed to the normality of torture”.
Yashin added: “The fact that Alexei Navalny is not with us is a crime committed by Putin, who bears direct responsibility for his murder.”
Belarus rights activists meanwhile pressed Germany for answers as to why Belarusian political prisoners, including a prominent and popular opposition leader, had not been included in the prisoner swap.
Maria Kalesnikava, part of an alliance that inflicted the severest electoral blow to Belarusian strongman President Alexander Lukashenko in his three-decade rule, has been in jail since September 2020.
Activists, including her sister Tatsiana Khomich, are asking why German and US efforts to trade a Russian state hitman for human rights activists did not extend to Kalesnikava and others in Belarusian jails.
“We communicated to the German government about the situation of political prisoners,” Khomich said. “She got many awards in Germany. This is the question: Why wasn’t she in the group that was released?”
The deal involved 24 prisoners – 16 moving from Russia to the West and eight sent back to Russia from the West.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz presented the decision to release hitman Vadim Krasikov as a difficult but necessary one, in return for which Germany was able to secure the release of prisoners of conscience and a German sitting on death row in Belarus.
“We were astonished to realise that not a single Belarusian prisoner was freed under this deal,” wrote Razam, a group of Belarusian activists in Germany. “Maria Kalesnikova, Maxim Znak and many others are still in prison. And this even though the government clearly negotiated not just with the Kremlin but also with the Lukashenko regime.”
Khomich said when she heard about a possible exchange where Germany was also involved she hoped Maria could feature.
Kalesnikava, a musician with deep ties to Germany thanks to teaching flute for many years at a music conservatoire in Stuttgart, was part of an alliance, led by Sviatlana Tikhanouskaya, that most independent observers believe defeated Lukashenko in 2020 elections.
Lukashenko imprisoned thousands to crush months of street protests, with the help of his ally, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Kalesnikava was one of the best-known faces of those street protests, famous for greeting fellow protesters by shaping her fingers into a heart as a sign of solidarity and hope.
Authorities attempted to deport her to Ukraine. Instead, she tore up her passport and threw it out of the window as their car drew up to the border.
She is now serving an 11-year sentence after being convicted of unspecified national security charges that rights groups and Western governments dismiss as politically motivated.
