Last Thursday’s prisoner exchange with the US was a rare victory for human rights in Russia. Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Vice Chairman of Open Russia and protégé of slain opposition figure Boris Nemtsov, was freed from his 25-year sentence for treason. Ilya Yashin, a liberal politician who called Vladimir Putin a ‘war criminal’ and said Russia’s wartime censorship laws were unconstitutional, saw his eight-and-a-half-year sentence terminated. The chairs of the shuttered human rights organisation Memorial Oleg Orlov and Sasha Skochilenko are also embracing their newfound freedom.
Despite only just escaping Putin’s draconian prisons, the eyes of these human rights crusaders are firmly on Russia’s future. Orlov has expressed cautious optimism that other prisoner exchanges will follow. Yashin and Kara-Murza have defiantly vowed to eventually return to Russia and continue their fights for freedom. Their courage should be lionised, as the hardest work of freeing Russian prisoners of conscience and combatting global repression of exiled Russian dissidents lies ahead.
OVD-Info, a Russian human rights and civil society organisation, noted that the swap deal released just 1 per cent of the 700 political prisoners in Russia. Hundreds more are mired in pre-trial detention, which can take months or years to culminate in an inevitable sentence. The former Mayor of Yekaterinburg Yevgeny Roizman is the most high-profile dissident stuck in Russian legal purgatory. Hours after Putin announced the start of Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine on 24 February 2022,........