di Oksana Chelysheva
On August 1 on the initiative from the USA a big prisoners´swap involving 24 people occured.
While Russia released 16 people whose only crime was their dissenting views, they got back 8 people, including Vadim Krasikov who Germany agreed to release despite their initial rejection of such a step towards a man who got life for the assassination of a former Chechen rebel.
According to the Memorial human rights center, their list of political prisoners in Russia contains more than 700 names as of March 2024. They point out that the list was incomplete and the overall number of prisoners can reach more than 1100 names. OVD info webpage counts 1002 criminal cases against antiwar activists.
Quite many observers and analitics in various media outlets had started to shape the understanding of such a swap no sooner the news of it had been confirmed. Who is the main winner, the USA or Russia? Will the Democratic party use their success, also in persuasions of their allies to release Krasikov, in the election campaign against Trump? How will president Trump respond to his opponents´success, taking into account his numerous statements of his ability to mediate with difficult opponents?
The first statements by the now free Russian political prisoners have already caused a lot of turmoil.
The first press-conference by Andrey Pivovarov, Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza was held in the DW office on August 2nd. Some did not like the urge of Vladimir Kara-Murza ”not to believe propaganda” when he said of those many Russians who were not afraid to share their antiwar views in their correspondence to him in prison. Ilya Yashin was immediatelty targeted by the barrage of criticism for expressing his opinion about the immediate need to start negotiation over the war in Ukraine. Both Andrey Pivovarov and Ilya Yashin were telling of them being paned for their extraditon from Russia against their will.
I have a firm opinion that every rescued life of a political prisoner matters more than anything else.The less political prisoners there are in the world, the most secure democracy is.
Yashin was sentenced to 8,5 years of general regime colony in December 2022 on the charges of ”descrediting the Russian army by spreading fakes”. He has spent most of the served term in the prison inside the detention colony. He was put there for the slightest breaches of the protocol or rather what the guards had interpreted for those. The Nobel Prise laureate Oleg Orlov went to prison on the same charges as Yashin being sentenced to 2,5 years in February 2024. Lilia Chanysheva, a former associate of Alexei Navalny, got 7,5 years-long sentence on extremism-related charges in June 2023. Another associate of Navalny Ksenia Fadeeva was serving her 9-year sentence on charges of ”extremist activity”. Vadim Ostanin was also working with Navalny and got 9 years for that. Vladimir Kara-Murza´s sentence was one of the severest. In April 2023 he got 25 years on charges of discrediting the army and state treason. Alexandra Skochilenko was sentenced to 7 years in Novermber 2023 for replacing supermarket price tags with antiwar slogans. Andrey Pivovarov led the Open Russia movement at the time of the arrest. It was banned and he got four years of detention colony.
However, the number of political prisoners in Russia is not limited to the people on the swap list.
At the time of the swap the news came from the Far East of Russia where Pavel Kushnir, a pianist, composer and an author, died in the remand prison in Birobidjan due to his dry hunger strike. Pavel Kushnir was arrested in the end of May this year after had he posted four antiwar statements in his YouTube channel with just 5 subscribers. It is only now that Pavel Kushnir is seen as a symbol. Nobody knew of his desperate decision to stop drinking water. There was no public campaign for his release. He died unknown. He is known now. Today a 30-minute long farewell ceremony is to be held in Birobidjan after which the urn with his ashes will be delivered to his mother in Taganrog. Taganrog is almost 8500 km away from Birobidjan, the city in the Far East where Pavel Kushnir wanted to stay to play music.
Maria Ponomarenko, a journalist from Barnaul, is serving her 6-year-long sentence for the opinion post in Telegram about Mariupol. Roman Ivanov, a journalist with RusNews, was sentenced to 7 years for three posts in hsi social media accounts. Igor Kuznetsov, another RusNews journalist, got 3,5 years of suspended sentence but was not released because of another criminal case being initiated against him. It threatens Kuznetsov with up to 9 years behind bars. Mikhail Afanasyev is sentenced to 5,5 years for his article about 11 riot police servicemen having refused to be sent to the combat area in Ukraine. Professor Boris Kagarlitsky charged with ”justification of terrorism” was sentenced to pay a fine in December 2023 but later his sentence was changed to five years in a detention colony.
This tragedy is caused also by the inclination of some political and media circiles to stick to the easy assumptions of all Russians being unanimous in justifying the war.
Cover Photo from Il Post
