I never doubted that the United States would not abandon Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan in their time of need, but I did not expect their release to happen so quickly. My sources in Moscow did not believe that an agreement could be reached before the elections in November or even before the inauguration of the new US president next January.
I am very happy that some of the hostages, including Russian citizens who were captured solely because of their honesty and courage, have been freed. They stood against the war in Ukraine and fought for freedom. Until the moment they were released, I feared that some of them would end their lives in prison.
Who gained freedom thanks to these efforts?
One is seventy-one-year-old Oleg Orlov, a legendary Soviet human rights defender and one of the leaders of Memorial, an organization that received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. Orlov publicly called the Putin regime totalitarian and fascist, and for this, he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison this year.
There is also Sasha Skochilenko, a thirty-three-year-old artist from St. Petersburg. At the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she made a small art performance in which she replaced price tags in a grocery store with anti-war slogans. For this, she was sentenced to seven years in prison. Her imprisonment posed a direct threat to her life: Sasha has a heart defect and bipolar disorder, and in the conditions of a Russian prison, she could have died.
Another example is the schoolboy Kevin Lik, who is now nineteen years old but was arrested while still a minor. He was accused of photographing military equipment and sending the photos to someone abroad. He was accused of state treason. Obviously, the Russian authorities themselves did not believe that a schoolboy could be a spy, and in the end, he was sentenced to only four years in prison, whereas in Russia, espionage usually results in much longer sentences. However, this is practically a child, and he was sentenced to four years in prison.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, a prominent activist and journalist whom Russian special services tried to poison, sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. Ilya Yashin, probably the most famous opposition figure in Russia after Navalny’s death, sentenced to eight-and-a-half years.
Now Evan, Paul, Oleg, Sasha, Kevin, Vladimir, Ilya, and other hostages of Putin’s regime have gained freedom.
But even on such a day, I cannot stop thinking about the thousands of people who remain in Putin’s prisons. About the poet Zhenya Berkovich. About the politician Alexei Gorinov, who protested against the war from the first day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and is now dying in prison. About Daniil Kholodny, an information technology specialist who was imprisoned for eight years for creating a website for now-deceased opposition leader Alexei Navalny. About thousands of other people.
I do not call them all “hostages” by chance.
I am sure that most people living in Russia feel like hostages. About twenty-five years ago, power in Russia was seized by a gang of terrorists led by Vladimir Putin. All these years, they have been terrorizing the country’s population, imprisoning people for any disobedience, teaching citizens to think that resistance is impossible and useless, doing everything to make Russians develop Stockholm syndrome. It is impossible to help all of them; it is impossible to exchange millions of people. But it is important to remember that thousands of hostages are sitting in Putin’s prisons. And over the years, Putin has successfully turned the whole country into a gulag. And many people feel like hostages, even if they are not behind bars.
Mikhail Zygar is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker, and the founding editor-in-chief of Russia’s only independent news television channel, Dozhd (TVRain). He was recently sentenced in absentia by a Moscow court to eight and a half years in prison for criticizing the Russian army.
A version of this article originally appeared on Zygar’s Substack, the Last Pioneer.
Further reading
Thu, Aug 1, 2024
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