In July, prison officials at correctional facility No. 3, near Smolensk, in western Russia, told Ilya Yashin to request a Presidential pardon. Yashin is a longtime activist and opposition politician who, after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, became one of the country’s most visible antiwar figures. His YouTube show, watched by millions, chronicled the grim truth of the war, including atrocities committed by the Russian military. An episode devoted to Bucha, the Kyiv suburb where hundreds of Ukrainian civilians were killed, ultimately led to his arrest for the supposed crime of disseminating “false information” about the Russian armed forces. In December, 2022, he was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison.
But when prison bosses urged Yashin to formally request a pardon from Russian President Vladimir Putin, he refused. “I consider Putin a war criminal, expect no mercy from him, and won’t ask for any,” he recalled telling them in a recent interview. Yashin was taken to Moscow, anyway, where he was deposited in an isolation cell in Lefortovo, a prison known to be under the de-facto control of the F.S.B. Yashin asked for something to read; guards brought him the memoirs of Andrei Sakharov, the famed Soviet dissident. They have a sense of humor, he thought.
At some point, Yashin became aware that he was being prepared for a prisoner exchange. If he were traded, he would gain his freedom, but he would be forced to live abroad. “Russia is my home,” Yashin told me. “The mere thought that someone would kick me out of my home is outrageous. Why does Putin get to decide if I live here or not? It’s just as much my country as his.”
He also made a pragmatic calculation. “Yes, it was risky and dangerous to stay,” he said. “But I understand perfectly well that the word of a politician who remains in his country, with his people, weighs far more than that of a politician who emigrates.” In 2020, when the opposition leader Alexei Navalny was in Germany recovering from a poison attack and preparing to return to Russia, where he knew he would be arrested, he and Yashin spoke by phone. “You would make the same choice,” Navalny told him. Yashin replied, “That’s right.” The logic was not lost on either side. “The Russian authorities understand this fact of political life perfectly well,” Yashin said.
Yashin asked the guards for a sheet of paper and a pen. He wrote a letter addressed to the head of Lefortovo prison. “The Russian constitution forbids the deportation of Russian citizens without their consent,” he wrote. He made clear that he was categorically opposed to being sent outside the country. “I insist on my legal right to remain on the territory of the country where I was born.”
The letter was ignored. On August 1st, Yashin, along with fourteen other people imprisoned in Russia—including Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, who had been jailed for sixteen months—were released as part of a multiparty prisoner exchange, the largest since the end of the Cold War. Yashin was flown from Turkey, the site of the trade, to Cologne, in western Germany, and, ultimately, ended up in Berlin. When I met him recently in the German capital, he showed me a copy of the letter he had written in Lefortovo. He had hoped to rip up his passport before boarding the plane in Russia, but F.S.B. guards handed it to him only when they were approaching the airport in Ankara. “I still have a strong feeling of internal protest,” he said. “As if I’m not where I’m supposed to be.”
Yashin told me of the strange experience of adjusting to life not just outside of prison but outside of Russia. He keeps planning to sleep late but instead wakes at six in the morning, the hour when guards rouse inmates in Smolensk. He peppers his speech with prison slang, calling doors “breaks” and ending exchanges with the phrase “bazara net”—literally “there’s no bazaar here”—which signals that a person is inclined to agree with whatever has been proposed. The other night, he went for a walk around Berlin and ended up on a wide, multilane thoroughfare. His head started to spin. “It was as if I were intoxicated,” he told me. “I hadn’t been in such a wide-open space in two years.” He caught himself a few times stepping outside his hotel room and, unconsciously, putting his hands behind his back—a reënactment of the orders that guards gave every time they escorted him from his cell.
His mother and father flew from Moscow to Berlin to reunite with him. “Of course, there is plenty of euphoria and joy,” Yashin told me. “But at the same time, one moment you could be sitting there, enjoying your mom’s omelette, and the next, it’s as if someone runs up and hits you in the head with a hammer.” At a press conference last week, he declared that he considers his role in the prisoner trade an “illegal expulsion from Russia against my will.” He told me that he has asked German officials if he is allowed to book a flight back to Russia. He said that they told him yes—he is a free person in every sense of the word—but that “they also told me I should understand my responsibility.”
The prisoner of utmost importance to the Kremlin in the exchange was Vadim Krasikov, who killed a former Chechen rebel commander in Berlin in 2019. It had not been politically easy for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to release Krasikov, a convicted murderer serving a life sentence in German prison; members of his own administration were opposed to the idea. How would it look if Germany traded Krasikov to free Yashin, among others, who then returned to Russia and was put right back in prison? “This would be a big blow to the supporters of such exchanges,” Yashin said, “and make future ones that much harder to make happen.”
Yashin remains concerned for other opposition figures who were not included in the trade. In March, 2022, four months before Yashin was detained, a municipal deputy in Moscow, Alexei Gorinov, whom Yashin considered an ally and friend, spoke out against the war during a council meeting and was subsequently arrested. “We have been promised victory and glory,” Gorinov said in court; instead, he went on, Russians were left feeling “shame and guilt.” He was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Yashin took Gorinov’s case as a personal warning. Police officers searched the municipal headquarters where Gorinov kept an office—and where Yashin once worked, too—and later made clear to Yashin that he was in danger. “Gorinov is arrested,” they told him, “and he opened his mouth a lot less than you have.”
In prison, Gorinov, who is sixty-three, has spent long stints in solitary confinement. He has a chronic lung condition that has grown more severe; after one visit, his lawyer reported that his skin was blue and that Gorinov didn’t have the strength to sit in a chair or hold a conversation. After Navalny died suddenly, this February, in a prison colony above the Arctic Circle, Yashin called on Western leaders to consider a trade to free Russian political prisoners. He included Gorinov’s name in these pleas but not his own. Instead, he was freed, and Gorinov remained imprisoned. (Yashin has since expressed his frustration to German officials that Gorinov was not part of the trade.) “I feel like I’m a stowaway who sat in someone else’s seat,” he told me.