Ilya Yashin, a Russian opposition activist freed from jail in Thursday’s prisoner swap, pledged to carry on his political fight against President Vladimir Putin from abroad, but expressed fury at having been deported against his will.
The prisoner swap, the largest since the Cold War, saw eight Russians, including a convicted murderer, exchanged for 16 prisoners in Russian and Belarusian jails, many of them dissidents. It was hailed as a win by Western leaders who feared for the dissidents’ lives after the death in jail last year of politician Alexei Navalny.
But Yashin, imprisoned in 2022 for criticising Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, said he had not given his consent to deportation and that others in more urgent need of medical care should have gone instead of him.
“From my first day behind bars I said I was not willing to be a part of any exchanges,” he said in an emotional news conference in Bonn on Friday during which he occasionally removed his glasses to blink back tears.
