Russian dissidents freed as part of a prisoner swap between Moscow and the west have shared their mixed feelings about the deal and vowed to continue their political activity from abroad.
The exchange represented a “difficult dilemma”, said the Russian liberal opposition politician Ilya Yashin at an emotional press conference in Bonn.
“It encourages Putin to take more hostages,” said Yashin, who had been serving a jail sentence for denouncing Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Yashin and the British-Russian activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who had been serving a 25-year sentence, said they had never agreed to leave their homeland.
“I don’t view [it] as a prisoner swap, I view the operation as my illegal expulsion from Russia against my will, and I say sincerely, more than anything I want now to go back home,” Yashin told reporters.
“Other prisoners who have health issues should have been exchanged ahead of me,” Yashin said as he appeared to be blinking back tears.
He added that his task now was to continue the fight for freedom and democracy in his country. He had been told that if he attempted to return he would suffer the fate of Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison camp last year under unclear circumstances.
The White House on Thursday revealed that Navalny had been set to be included in the deal before his death.
Kara-Murza speculated that Navalny might still be alive had the west managed to negotiate the swap with the Kremlin sooner.
“It’s hard for me not to think that, maybe if these processes had somehow moved quicker – if there had been less resistance – that the Scholz government had to overcome in terms of freeing Krasikov, then maybe Alexei would have been here and free,” he told reporters.
Yashin added: “The fact that Alexei Navalny is not with us is a crime committed by Putin, who bears direct responsibility for his murder.”
US journalist Evan Gershkovich and Vadim Krasikov, who murdered a Chechen exile in Berlin, 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.
Kara-Murza acknowledged how difficult it had been for Germany to agree to release Krasikov but said that the deal had saved “16 human lives”.
He told reporters that until his release on Thursday, 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.
But 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.
Kara-Murza said that when the plane taking him and the other prisoners to Ankara took off, the agent escorting him had told him to take a good look out of the window because he would never see his homeland again.
“And I laughed,” he said. “I told him, look, I’m a historian … I don’t only feel, I don’t only believe, I know that I’ll be back in my home country. And it’ll be much quicker than you think.”
With reporting by Reuters and AFP