When freedom means exile: Inside the Russian prisoner swap

Some released from the Kremlin’s custody weren’t flying toward home but away from it.

By EVA HARTOG

^{Illustration by Marcus Marritt for POLITICO}

When the Russian prison guards grabbed Sasha Skochilenko from her cell and put her on a plane, her first thought was whether, at just 33 years old, she was about to meet her end.

“Am I being taken into a forest for execution?” wondered Skochilenko, who had been sentenced to seven years in prison in 2023 for swapping supermarket price tags with messages protesting the war in Ukraine.

Instead, like seven other Russian democracy activists, three American citizens and five German nationals, she was flown out of the country as part of an Aug. 1 prisoner exchange negotiated between Washington, Berlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

More than a month later, the Russian democracy activists who were freed are still grappling with the implications of their release. 

Like their foreign counterparts, Skochilenko and her compatriots had no say in their participation in the swap, which included the release of eight Russian spies and criminals from Western custody, including Vadim Krasikov, an FSB officer convicted of carrying out an assassination in Berlin. 

Unlike them, however, they weren’t being flown home — but away from it.

In Russia, the trade has been celebrated as one which bought the return of patriots who had dedicated their lives to the Kremlin’s cause in exchange for disposable traitors and enemies, who had always opposed it. 

In the West, it’s mostly been cheered as a diplomatic success, one that secured the release of Russian dissidents and Western victims of politically motivated arrests, including the American journalist Evan Gershkovich.

For many of the Russian democracy activists, however, the feelings are decidedly mixed. POLITICO spoke to four of the former prisoners about their experiences before, during and after the swap. Two others have given other media interviews or posted on social media. Two remain silent.

Those who have spoken described a bitter cocktail of gratitude and guilt, at having accepted freedom in exchange for imprisonment, at being cut off from their family and the activism they pursued at home, at having secured a spot on a lifeboat while hundreds of others were left behind and at the nagging belief that the deal may have been engineered by the Kremlin to strengthen its grip while weakening the opposition. 

“Тhe hand of the past still reaches into my present,” Skochilenko said. Even as they were being flown toward freedom, “no one jumped for joy,” she added. “The air was heavy.”

 * * * 

The first hint that something unusual might be about to happen came in late July, when, in places of incarceration hundreds of kilometers apart, the eight jailed Russians were handed a piece of blank paper on which, the prison bosses said, they could write a letter asking Putin for clemency.

Rumors had been swirling of a prisoner swap, possibly involving Gershkovich, Krasikov and — until he suddenly died in a remote Arctic penal colony — the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny. But the chances that a deal could include other, less well-known Russian prisoners seemed to them about as high as the average acquittal rate in the country (0.3 percent). 

And yet, here was a suggestion to file a written appeal to the president, a legal requirement for amnesty. 

The conditions in prison were harsh. Like Navalny before his death, one of the prisoners, Vladimir Kara-Murza — convicted to 25 years for treason for his democracy activism abroad — was denied food and sleep and forbidden from lying down from early morning until evening. 

He was only allowed pen and paper for 90 minutes a day, leaving oceans of time to stare at the walls of his 2-by 3-meter cell. In jail, he lost 25 kilos. 

Others were submitted to less onerous regimes. But, in an echo of the Soviet gulag system, most described isolation as a core part of their punishment. Lilia Chanysheva, a former Deloitte consultant, developed sores from being forced to labor in a sewing factory. Sent to prison for her link with Navalny, she did not see her husband for an entire year. 

Ilya Yashin, a prominent opposition politician, saw his parents only twice. Andrei Pivovarov, another political activist, was for a long time kept separate from other prisoners. Under constant surveillance, prison guards jumped on minor infractions to punish him further. “The system sees us as dangerous,” he told POLITICO. “We are isolated so that we can’t influence anybody.” 

The only information came from his lawyers and letters, many from people he’d never met before, which, despite passing through the prison censors, offered a glimpse of life outside the walls. At one point toward the end of his sentence, Pivovarov was allowed to watch state TV, where “black is white and white is black,” he said.

He said he’d try to keep his spirits up by doing complicated mental math equations around the number of days of his sentence: 1,191. “You wake up in a bad mood, but then calculate that, for example, you’ve completed 83 percent of your time, which helps improve your spirits.” 

Nonetheless, not all the prisoners leaped at the possibility of release. 

Yashin, a prominent Kremlin critic, had been sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for denouncing Russian war crimes on YouTube. He refused outright to appeal to Putin.

Others complied, trying to write the letter, but without admitting guilt.

The historian Oleg Orlov (sentenced to two and a half years for writing an anti-war article) asked for twenty minutes of reflection. “I’m not going to pretend to be a hero,” he told POLITICO.

Seventy-one years old and the co-founder of the rights group Memorial, which documents Soviet-era repression, Orlov was familiar with stories about victims of the Russian dictator Josef Stalin who had begged him for mercy, incriminating themselves in crimes they had not committed.

While Orlov was desperate to get out of prison, he was worried a letter to Putin would provide fodder for the Kremlin’s propagandists and undermine everything he stood for, demoralizing those who regarded political prisoners such as himself as a moral compass.

So when, the next day, he was suddenly taken from his cell, without being told where or why he was being transferred, he assumed some form of punishment was coming. 

 * * * 

Meanwhile, outside the prison walls, the dissidents’ friends and family were suddenly being turned away from the prisons with the message that their loved ones were no longer there.

Tipped that Skochilenko had been moved to Moscow, her girlfriend, Sonya Subbotina, dashed from St. Petersburg with the medication and food she needed to treat her celiac disease. But at every penal facility she visited, including the notorious Lefortovo prison, she received the same answer: No convict under that name was registered there.

In truth, the eight Russians were being held in separate cells in Lefortovo. Given no information during their long journeys to Moscow, each had come up with a version of what was about to happen: Some expected to be brought before a court for an impromptu second trial. Pivovarov thought he might be being sent to the front line to fight against Ukraine. 

As the most well-known Putin critic after Navalny, Yashin was the first to catch on to what was brewing. He wrote a letter to the prison leadership reiterating what he’d said many times since his arrest: He wanted to stay in Russia and deporting him without his consent would be illegal.

Convinced that his rightful place was in Russia, he didn’t want to lead an opposition movement from the safety of exile, which he believed to be both inefficient and immoral. Nevertheless, on the morning of Aug. 1, five days after his transfer to Lefortovo, two bulky FSB officers entered his cell. 

The officers took him down a flight of stairs guarded by a phalanx of the FSB’s Alpha special anti-terror unit — their faces hidden by black balaclavas, pistols strapped to their waists — and outside where a large silver tour bus with tinted windows stood waiting. 

Yashin was the first to board. 

The others trickled in — Orlov, Skochilenko, Pivovarov (four years for running an “undesirable” rights group), and three associates of Navalny: Chanysheva, Ksenia Fadeyeva and Vadim Ostanin.

Kara-Murza, a dual Russian-British citizen and a United States green card holder, completed the Russian group.

The Russians were seated at the front of the bus. The U.S. and German nationals, some of whom are also Russian citizens, were settled at the rear. Among them were Gershkovich and the U.S. Marine Paul Whelan. Each prisoner was assigned an Alpha agent who took the aisle seat next to them.

A man in a blazer picked up the microphone: “Hello everyone,” he said, confirming what by now seemed obvious: They were about to be part of a prison swap. At the “final destination,” they’d get their passports back and other important documents on their release. 

* * *

In silence, Yashin plotted his next move. He’d rip up his passport at customs to prevent being deported. 

At the airport, the FSB agents led them by the shoulder straight from the bus into a Tupolev TU-204-300 government plane, where the Americans and Germans were seated in business class, while the Russians were placed in economy.

And, again, they sat in separate rows by the window, with their minders at the aisle.

With relish, Kara-Murza’s FSB minder told him to look out the window for his last-ever glimpse of his homeland. “I know I’ll be back, and much sooner than you think,” Kara-Murza snapped back. 

Meanwhile, Skochilenko’s mind was racing. On the bus, her chaperone had threatened to put a bag over her head if she didn’t stop talking to her fellow travelers. 

Who was to say the plane wouldn’t plummet to the ground and deliberately kill them all? “After two and a half years in prison, you learn that they lie to you about literally everything: big and small,” she recalled.

On her way out of prison, the guards had returned her possessions, which included a flute. To soothe herself, she took it out and started to play. This time, the FSB officer beside her ignored her; he had earphones in and was playing a game on his phone.

The further the plane flew away from Moscow, the more laid-back the FSB men seemed to get. By the time they were somewhere over Baku, Azerbaijan, they had taken off their masks and were munching on food they’d brought from home: bread, salted pork, boiled eggs and tea, which they offered to share with the women prisoners (who declined). 

Yashin had somehow managed to make his chaperone feel comfortable enough to share stories about his time on the front line with Ukraine and even criticize Russia’s military leadership. 

In the row in front of him, Kara-Murza was arguing with his minder about the definition of patriotism. 

“It was strange, like a scene from an arthouse film, a tragicomedy,” Yashin said. 

* * *

The plane landed in the Turkish capital Ankara, where the group was transferred to another bus with tinted windows. Now they were guarded by stylish Turkish security officials, Pivovarov recalled.

From behind the glass, Skochilenko flashed her middle finger at the FSB and told them to “fuck off.” 

“It’s something I’d wanted to do for a long time,” she said. 

Across the tarmac, they could see another group being escorted into the plane they’d just arrived in. One was wearing red trousers and a helmet. Behind it was the face of Krasikov, the FSB agent who had carried out a killing in Berlin, whose return Putin had made his mission to secure.

An official from the German Foreign Ministry boarded the bus, comparing their faces to printouts of old photographs (some recognized theirs from Wikipedia) and asking questions to establish their identities. They were then taken to a private section of the airport and given a phone to notify their families. 

For the first time in eleven months, Kara-Murza talked with his wife and children, quickly switching from Russian to English upon learning they were standing next to U.S. President Joe Biden in the Oval Office. 

Some two hours later, the Russians were brought to a small jet; the Americans had already left on a separate flight. 

As they rose above the clouds for the second time that day, there were no cheers or popping Champagne corks. Instead, they asked, some in silence, some aloud:  Why? 

Why had they made the list of those to be swapped and not, for example, Alexei Gorinov, a Moscow politician who suffers from a chronic lung condition, jailed for criticizing Russia’s war? Or Igor Baryshnikov, a cancer patient convicted to seven and a half years in Kaliningrad for a Facebook post? 

About a month and a half earlier, Orlov had dreamed about being granted leave to go home. The experience of being in his own apartment had been so visceral that waking up had been an unpleasant shock that had left him reeling. He couldn’t shake the feeling that at any moment he would snap out of it and find himself back in his cell. 

Others experienced a similar sense of dissociation, like they were watching themselves on a screen. “Prison had not let go of us,” said Skochilenko. 

When they landed at Germany’s Cologne Bonn airport, they were met on the tarmac by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Coming down the plane stairs, Kara-Murza was still wearing long underwear and rubber shower slippers. Yashin had on his prison uniform and carried no belongings other than a toothbrush. 

Pivovarov lugged a big bag of books his prison guards had confiscated as dangerous literature but insisted he take with him. They included “The end of the regime” on dictatorships in southern Europe by Alexander Baunov, “The German War: A Nation Under Arms,” by Nicholas Stargardt on Nazi Germany; and works by philosopher Michel Foucault.

The group was shuttled straight to a military medical facility in Koblenz to be thoroughly screened, including for signs of radiation. 

“They haven’t forgotten the story with Navalny,” said Pivovarov, evoking the politician’s dramatic airlifting to Berlin in 2020 where he recovered from Novichok poisoning. 

* * *

A day after the swap, the three biggest political names, Kara-Murza, Yashin and Pivovarov, staged a press conference in Cologne.

Many of those watching expected pure exuberance at the men’s newfound freedom. But while Kara-Murza thanked the German authorities for “saving 16 lives,” Yashin — now in unnaturally crisp new clothes and bright white sneakers — delivered an emotional tirade. 

He had been freed against his will, he said, while others with life-threatening conditions had been left behind.

Pivovarov, though clearly happy to find himself in Germany, seemed confused: He’d had just one month remaining of his sentence; theoretically, he’d have soon walked free regardless.

Speaking to POLITICO several weeks after the press conference, Yashin’s anger seemed more contained. He said he’d told Scholz on the night of the swap that he understood his ethical dilemma and that he’d made the right call, choosing humanitarian over political concerns. 

But, he added, “I feel like a free rider who took someone else’s place. To use a Russian phrase: Good has been committed against me.” 

The three governments that negotiated the swap have been tight-lipped about the details of the negotiations. The German government declined a request for comment. A senior White House administration official told POLITICO the final list of Russian prisoners was agreed on by national security adviser Jake Sullivan and his German counterpart Jens Plötner. 

The opaque decision-making has left the prisoners themselves wondering what was behind their release. Did Western pressure push Putin to free some of his most vocal opponents? Or was the swap a convenient way for the Russian strongman to rid himself of vocal critics?

Yashin told POLITICO he’d been given to understand that the initiative to include him and Kara-Murza, two important opposition figures, had come from Berlin. The Kremlin, he said, had responded enthusiastically. 

According to Yashin, the Kremlin also asked Germany for a “guarantee” he would not go back. Berlin, he said, had refused, but he felt his back was nonetheless against the wall.

High-level officials had told him that a return to Russia would risk turning the Western public against future swaps. If he hoped to one day free Gorinov and other comrades in arms, he’d better stay put.

* * *

After being isolated from public debate for so long, striking the right note with different groups of Russian speakers — those in exile, still inside the country and Ukrainians under attack from Moscow — has proven treacherous.

Within days of the swap, Yashin faced backlash for calling for peace talks, which some interpreted as him saying Ukraine should be prepared to give up territory (which he denies). 

Pivovarov received his own dose of heat for questioning whether it would be right as a “Russian politician” to express support for the Ukrainian army. And Kara-Murza for calling to ease sanctions against ordinary Russians.  

“Russian society is extremely divided. We treat each other like enemies,” Yashin told POLITICO. 

Considering they were jailed precisely for their anti-war views, some of the dissidents were surprised to suddenly find themselves accused of a pro-Kremlin bias or of harboring imperialist sentiments. 

Pivovarov tried to take the edge off with tongue-in-cheek humor, calling his time in prison a “time of indulgence” during which he got to play the hero while being sheltered from criticism. 

For better or for worse, he joked, “That’s over now.”

Since their release, the freed prisoners have made a point of highlighting something they can all agree on: the plight of the roughly 1,000 political prisoners still stuck in Russia’s untransparent penitentiary system. Orlov said he hoped to one day play a role in reforming it in a post-Putin, democratic Russia. 

“I’m slowly understanding that this is neither a dream nor a film, but that this is really happening to me,” he said.

“And that it’s time to plan for the future.” 

Erin Banco in Washington and Nette Nöstlinger in Berlin contributed to this report.