COLOGNE, Germany — Escaping the brutal Russian penal system would seem like blessed deliverance to most inmates. But not to Ilya Yashin, who stunned the world last week when he angrily condemned his inclusion in a sweeping prisoner swap that freed him and a handful of other opposition figures in Russia.
Instead, he portrayed it as an act of duplicity rather than a benevolent humanitarian gesture.
“What happened on Aug. 1, I don’t view as a prisoner swap,” he said Friday at a news conference in Bonn, Germany, seemingly blinking back tears, “but as my illegal expulsion from Russia against my will. And I say sincerely, more than anything I want now to go back home.”
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To those who have followed Yashin’s career, his stance should not have been so surprising. He has spent the past two decades in Russia working against Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule, knowing that doing so would land him in jail and even preparing for it.
In a wide-ranging interview Saturday night just 48 hours after his release, Yashin said the very fact that Russia was willing to free him confirmed “that I was actually a problem for them behind bars.”
Since his detention in June 2022, Yashin, 41, had managed to publish essays, letters and statements against Putin and his invasion of Ukraine.
He was willing to serve his 8 1/2-year sentence and had communicated clearly and repeatedly that he did not want to be included in any prisoner exchange. Others who were older or more infirm deserved priority, he said. He did not see his exchange as a concession by the Kremlin, but rather an attempt to deprive him of his moral authority.
“I was well aware that while in Russia, even behind bars — especially behind bars — I could tell the truth and the weight of my words would be quite high,” he said in the interview, a few hours after buying new clothes, sneakers and a simple black watch. “Because when I stay in Russia and take those risks, I’m actually responsible for my words. People hear you much better when you’re there. And the fact that I was expelled from Russia proves that I was right.”
At Friday’s news conference, he said, “More than anything, I want to return home.” But he said he was told by the Russian security service representative who was accompanying him that if he did so, he would meet the same fate as Alexei Navalny, the late opposition leader. Navalny returned to Russia in 2021 after being poisoned, was immediately arrested, and died this year in an Arctic penal colony.
Yashin said he was also told that returning to Russia would render the exchange of other political prisoners impossible.
Now that Yashin has traded his black prison uniform for civilian clothes, it remains to be seen whether he can make a much harder transition: preaching his anti-Kremlin message to Russians from the relatively comfortable position of freedom in the West.
“Time will tell whether I will be able to remain a problem for them abroad,” he continued. “I don’t really understand how to be a Russian politician in exile. I don’t know how to do it, but I’ll try to learn it and try to be effective here, too.”
For several decades, as Putin eroded political freedom in Russia — a crackdown that intensified after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 — many Russian dissidents went into exile. Yashin instead went to the dentist; he was sure he would eventually be arrested for speaking his mind, and he wanted his teeth to be in decent shape in jail, where dental care is notoriously lacking.
As authorities effectively criminalized protest and made it illegal to even call the invasion a war, Yashin, who was serving as a municipal deputy in Moscow, used every opportunity to condemn it in the strongest terms.
He knew, he said, that if he wanted to encourage Russians to stand up to Putin, he would have to lead by example, even if it meant going to prison.
In April 2022, as Russia’s military withdrew from the suburbs around Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, Yashin appeared on his YouTube channel to condemn the brutal treatment of civilians in Bucha and the emerging accusations of war crimes by the Russian army. Several months later, Yashin was arrested and charged with “discrediting” the Russian armed forces.
“I acted not only for reasons of my own conscience, but also for pragmatic reasons and politics,” he said in the interview. “I wanted to be heard by Russian society, and I understood that I had to be behind bars to do this.”
Not everyone agrees. As Yashin walked on a street in Cologne, he was approached by one of his supporters, a Muscovite who had left Russia a year and a half ago, who thanked him for being “a hero.”
“For me, as an ordinary citizen, the most important thing is that Ilya is alive and that he is free,” the man, Mikhail Kharchenko, 38, said.
“I know he will manage fine” in exile, he added.
Yashin said his biggest priority would be to stay relevant to people back in Russia. As the war grinds on, and the gulf between exiled Russians and those remaining behind grows wider, it is becoming harder to reach them — while not alienating his Western hosts or Ukrainians.
Many Ukrainians expressed anger after Friday’s news conference, at which Yashin appeared with two other opposition figures who had been traded, Vladimir Kara-Murza and Andrei Pivovarov. These critics of the dissidents believe Russian citizens bear collective guilt, and were distressed by their assertions that the majority of Russians do not support the war, and that Western sanctions should target the elite that supports Putin, rather than society as a whole.
Memes appeared almost instantly accusing the three men of effectively being mouthpieces for the Kremlin. Yashin drew even more criticism after he told TV Rain, an opposition news channel based in Amsterdam, that he supported an immediate cease-fire. The next day he said he should have been more careful about his comments, and insisted that “not a single piece of Ukrainian land” should be surrendered to Putin.
One of the main pillars of his actions in exile, Yashin said, would be “anti-war education for Russian citizens.”
“The key task of the free world and the Western world now is to save Ukraine,” he said, underscoring that this was his central message to Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, who greeted the freed prisoners upon their exchange. “Because the front between the good and evil of freedom and tyranny, bigotry and progress, runs through Ukraine. If Putin is allowed to devour Ukraine, he will keep going.”
Yashin spent much of his jail time in solitary confinement because he had refused the two jobs he had been offered: building barracks for the prison colony and sewing uniforms for the Russian army. During his time in jail he wrote, read and occasionally met with his lawyers.
Once he has gotten settled, he said he would begin touring cities where exiled Russians live for consultations. More than 2,000 people have registered for his first public event in Berlin this week.
His other key focus, he said, would be advocacy for political prisoners remaining in Russia. The rights group OVD-Info has counted 2,702 people who are being “politically persecuted right now” in Russia, almost 1,300 of whom are in prison or pretrial detention. Ten have died in custody, including a pianist last week who had gone on hunger strike in a penal colony.
The pianist, Pavel Kushner, was charged with “inciting terrorism” because he posted anti-government videos on his YouTube channel. The channel had five subscribers.
Yashin has a much broader audience, and 1.6 million subscribers on YouTube. He addressed them on Sunday, starting his first stream since he was freed by talking about Kushner’s death, and advocating that a wide-ranging amnesty for political prisoners be included in any peace deal with Ukraine.
For now, he is adjusting to his new life, one he said he never imagined.
“I need to understand how to exercise this freedom,” he said. “I’ve never lived in exile. I didn’t want to live abroad. I never thought about it.”
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