A Russian dissident freed in the historic prisoner exchange earlier this month wishes he could return to Moscow to continue protesting against President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine.
Ilya Yashin, 41, was among the 24 detainees released during the largest prisoner swap between Russia and the West since the Cold War, the same exchange that freed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.
His inclusion was a surprise because he had not been campaigning for a pardon — and didn’t even want to leave his homeland, he told the Telegraph.
“The first thing I thought about when I ended up in Ankara was, get a ticket and fly home to Russia,” he said of the Turkish capital where the historic swap took place.
He even broke down during a press conference, saying: “What I want most right now is to go back home.”
The only thing stopping the Moscow native from returning was the knowledge that it would jeopardize future prisoner swaps, he said.
Still, he wants nothing more than to continue fighting against the Kremlin, even if it means going back to jail, he told the UK paper from his current base in Berlin.
“I don’t know how to be a Russian politician in exile but I will have to learn,” said Yashin, a friend of Alexi Navalny, the Putin critic who died in prison before he could be part of the exchange.
“I’d love to lie in the sun but I can’t do it because I understand my responsibility, and I need to do a certain amount of work right now: people are waiting for the released political prisoners to lean in,” Yashin told the Telegraph.
“If you want to win this battle, you need to risk and sacrifice something.”
Yashin has been a long-time critic of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison in 2022 for his criticism of the government.
In prison, the Russian dissident slept in a tiny camp bed in solitary confinement, where a siren would wake him up every morning at 5 a.m.
Yashin said he was not allowed to sit on the bed, forcing him to spend the rest of the day pacing his small cell or perched on a tiny stool.
Even while free, Yashin said he can’t stop himself from waking up at 5 a.m. or flinch when a waiter comes over with a dish in a restaurant, as he gets flashbacks to “when a jailer throws a bowl of prison grub at you.”
Despite being spared from enduring the cruelties in prison, Yashin believes his protests outside Russia will not mean as much as they would if he were in Moscow risking his safety.
“This is a moral choice but it has practical considerations too,” Yashin said as he brought up his late friend Navalny, who died in jail earlier this year.
“Both Navalny and I knew perfectly well that a word spoken in Russia, from a defendant’s dock or from behind bars, carries more weight than whatever you say sitting in a Berlin café,” he added.
