With last week's historic prisoner swap, Russian President Vladimir Putin did more than secure the release of his assassin friend. He also appears to have conveniently "rid himself of some of his most persistent critics," Politico reports, noting several Russian dissidents whisked from prisons inside Russia have said they were removed from the country without their consent—and to Putin's benefit. "It is a widely held belief in Russian political circles that waging a political battle against the Kremlin from exile is a lost cause," per Politico.
Ilya Yashin, who was serving an 8.5-year sentence for denouncing Russia's war in Ukraine, says he'd repeatedly expressed a wish of not being part of any prisoner exchange. "The Kremlin representatives gladly included my name because for them my exchange essentially means expulsion," he says, per USA Today. He adds he wants to return home to continue to fight Putin's regime, though it's unclear whether he'll be able to do so. Russia "asked for guarantees that after arriving in Germany I would not fly back," Yashin says, per Politico.
"Of course the Germans could not give that guarantee," adds Yashin. "I am a free person and can at any moment fly wherever I want." But other freed dissidents have said Russian authorities kept their travel documents, "presumably in order to make it more difficult for them to ever reenter Russia legally," per Politico. "It is clear that [the Russian authorities] will not allow us to return, although we want to," says Andrei Pivovarov, another freed dissident, per USA Today. Yashin seems to realize this, too. "I don't know how to do Russian politics outside of Russia, but I will try to learn," he says, per Deutsche Welle. (More Russia stories.)
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