Opposition leaders, newly freed, stoke controversy with first public comments

The biggest prisoner swap between Russia and the West since Soviet times has freed two of Russia’s leading liberal politicians — figures with genuine ambitions to lead the opposition in exile. Tet far from garnering sympathy for the more than two years they spent in Putin’s prison system, their first public appearances generated a storm of criticism from Ukraine and in some corners of the Russian opposition.

• One topic has dominated talk among both regime loyalists and its fiercest critics this week: the largest prisoner exchange in more than three decades between Russia and the West. Russian state propaganda has reveled in footage of President Vladimir Putin welcoming convicted FSB murderer Vadim Krasikov back home after almost five years in prison in Germany, while dozens of Russian emigres went to Cologne in Germany to greet the political prisoners freed from Russia. 
• The two key political figures who were released in the exchange were Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin. Kara-Murza is a former journalist and long-time associate of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. After Nemtsov was assassinated, he started working for exiled former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In the early 2010s Kara-Murza became the leading Russian lobbyist for the Magnitsky Act, the first piece of US legislation used to impose sanctions on Russian officials. After its passage, he devoted his efforts to advocating for more sanctions against Russian officials in both the US and the EU. He was almost killed by two poisonings in 2015 and 2017, and left with serious nerve damage as a result. The Bellingcat investigative media outlet has backed his claims they were carried out by the FSB, including some agents that were linked to the 2020 poisoning of Alexei Navalny. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Kara-Murza did not leave the country. He was arrested and sentenced to 25 years for treason and other charges, partly due to his intensive lobbying for Moscow to be hit with sanctions.
• Yashin is an independent politician who started out in the youth wing of the liberal Yabloko party alongside Navalny. The two have always been regarded as friends and colleagues, although Yashin never held a formal role in Navalny’s organizations. Like Kara-Murza, Yashin joined Nemtsov’s “People’s Freedom Party” in the 2000s and in the 2010s he was Nemtsov’s deputy. In 2017 he was elected as a Moscow city deputy. After the war broke out, Yashin refused to flee. He was arrested in June 2022 and later sentenced to 8.5 years in jail for spreading “false information” about the Russian military in YouTube reports of Russian war crimes in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.
• The day after their release, Kara-Murza, Yashin and a third freed opposition figure, Andrei Pivovarov, a former director of Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia movement, gave a press conference in Bonn as well as several interviews to Russian independent media outlets — all pledging to continue their political activity, as best they could, from exile.
• In the press conference, Kara-Murza recalled his involvement in lobbying for some of the first sanctions against Russia in the 2010s. He said that the main principle back then was to ensure sanctions were targeted against Putin’s regime and not ordinary Russians. But now, Kara-Murza said, the West was moving away from that idea and that sanctions were hitting broader Russian society — something he criticized. He promised to work to ensure that sanctions were limited to Putin’s regime alone. It’s easy to understand why this was a message he wanted to deliver. People in Russia, including opposition supporters and anti-war activists, are unhappy that they are hampered by sanctions. Any politician who actively and unconditionally approves of sanctions has no chance of garnering support inside Russia. In this sense, Kara-Murza is already vulnerable: he is known as a lobbyist for sanctions, something Putin’s propaganda will target. However Kara-Murza’s comments — and their endorsement by Pivavarov — attracted instant and predictable criticism from more radical Russian emigres, from Ukrainian officials, and from their European counterparts.
• Ilya Yashin ran into an even greater controversy with comments he gave in an interview to Dozhd TV. When asked how to break the deadlock in Ukraine, he said that both sides urgently need to get around the negotiating table to stop the fighting. In Ukraine, this was seen as a call to surrender territory occupied by Russia (according to polls, 44% of Ukrainians also support the start of peace negotiations, but the topic is taboo at the highest levels in Kyiv). Yashin’s words also drew fierce criticism from his fellow emigrants. The politician took to YouTube the next day to clarify what he meant and outline his anti-war position, saying that “under no circumstances should any part of Ukraine be surrendered to Putin.”

Why the world should care

Everything that is happening is part of an inevitable process: Russia’s anti-war opposition in exile is splitting into two ever more entrenched camps. The radicals, who wish to completely disassociate from Russia in all its forms, and a more moderate faction that wishes to continue trying to talk with and engage with Russians inside the country.