(Bloomberg) -- Prominent anti-Kremlin activist Ilya Yashin was in a Moscow jail when Russia struck the prisoner-swap deal that freed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and other Americans.
As the complex exchange unfolded on Aug. 1, Yashin was sent into exile and told not to return. Now in Berlin, he’s already eager to get back to Moscow.
The 41-year-old opposition politician said he refused an offer of political asylum in Germany because it would mean he could never travel to Russia. Instead, he has applied for a residency permit and plans to lobby European officials for an expansion of sanctions against people linked to President Vladimir Putin’s regime.
“Only 2,000 people are under sanctions, and 20,000 are needed,” Yashin said in an interview.
A German Interior Ministry spokesperson declined to comment on whether Yashin had rejected an offer of political asylum.
Yashin was a prominent figure at anti-Kremlin rallies alongside opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison in February after he had defied Putin and returned to Russia from Germany in early 2021. Weeks before the prisoner exchange, Yashin told the exiled independent channel TV Rain that he’d refuse to be part of a swap because it was “important to me to share the fate of my country” and to be a voice of opposition inside Russia.
Yashin was sentenced to 8 1/2 years in jail in December 2022 after being convicted of “discrediting” the Russian military. An outspoken opponent of Russia’s war in Ukraine, he’d highlighted the killings of civilians in the town of Bucha after it was occupied by Russian troops.
He was among imprisoned Russian dissidents including Vladimir Kara-Murza and Oleg Orlov, co-chairman of the Memorial human rights group, who were exchanged in the deal with the US and European nations including Germany. Eight Kremlin agents were sent to Moscow in return, including most controversially Vadim Krasikov, an assassin sentenced to life in prison in Germany for killing a Chechen commander in a Berlin park.
When prison officials moved him to Moscow’s Lefortovo detention center in preparation for the swap, Yashin said he wrote a statement demanding to stay in Russia, citing a constitutional ban on the deportation of citizens. It was ignored and he was put on the plane with an expired passport taken by police from a raid on his home when he was arrested, he said.
“On the day of the swap, several special forces guys came for me and I realized they would simply pack me up like a carcass, tie me up and send me away,” Yashin recalled. “They told me, ‘if you return, other political prisoners will never be released. If you come back, there will be no exchanges.’”
Yashin said German officials who met him in Ankara, where the prisoner swap took place, told him there’d be more exchanges. He said he has provided Germany with a list of about 20 people imprisoned in Russia as potential candidates for future swap talks, including journalist Ivan Safronov, theater director Yevgeniya Berkovich, playwright Svetlana Petriychuk and an opposition municipal deputy in Moscow, Alexei Gorinov.
Yashin said the Russian FSB officer who accompanied him on the flight from Moscow had some parting advice for him — “Behave well, otherwise Krasikov might come for you.”
--With assistance from Gina Turner and Kamil Kowalcze.
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