Zürcher Nachrichten - Freed activists criticise swap as Kremlin welcomes back its agents

Three opposition activists -- Vladimir Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin and Andrei Pivovarov -- were the first released prisoners to talk in detail about their ordeal, a day after being flown back to the west.

"Yesterday 16 human lives were saved. I don't think anything in this world could be more important," Kremlin critic Kara-Murza said, told journalists in Bonn.

Looking thin but smiling after spending over two years in a Moscow prison and a Siberian penal colony, he was seated next to his two fellow former prisoners.

Both Yashin and Kara-Murza said that they had never signed pardon requests, nor consented to being removed from Russia and flown to Turkey, the country that helped coordinate the prisoner swap.

Kara-Murza was serving a 25-year sentence on treason and other charges. But he said he had repeatedly refused to sign a request for a presidential pardon and had not agreed to any swap.

"It is expressly forbidden to expel Russian citizens from Russia without their consent," said the politician and journalist who has both Russian and British citizenship.

"Nobody asked our consent," he added: "Yet we are here."

- A forced 'deportation' -

Yashin expressed similar feelings.

"What happened to me on August 1, I don't see as a swap," said Yashin, who had previously said he would never agree to such a deal.

"I see this event as deportation from Russia against my will,"

Convicted in December 2022, the opposition politician was serving an eight and a half year sentence for spreading "false information" about the Russian military.

"It's a complex dilemma because of course it motivates Putin to take new hostages," Yashin added.

Just hours earlier Russia had acknowledged that among those release were some of its own secret service agents including one convicted of murder.

"It's hard to know you walked free because a murderer walked free," said Yashin.

- 'Russian agents' -

Earlier Friday, the Kremlin said that at least three Russians freed from foreign prisons as part of the swap had been were undercover Russian agents.

It was a rare public admission into the work of Moscow's top-secret security services.

Vadim Krasikov was serving life in prison in Germany for the 2019 murder of a former Chechen separatist commander in broad daylight in a Berlin park.

Moscow on Friday confirmed that he was an elite operative with Russia's FSB security agency.

Krasikov was one of the central figures in Thursday's historic multi-country exchange. Putin had openly lobbied for his release in a bid to get the deal over the line in the face of resistance from Berlin.

The Kremlin almost never reveals details about its sprawling intelligence agencies, but it confirmed Friday that at least two others freed in the deal were also long-term undercover agents stationed in the European Union.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has portrayed them as returning heroes, personally thanking them for their service to the "Motherland" and promising to shower them with state awards.

"Krasikov is an FSB employee," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Friday.

He served in the agency's elite and secretive "Alpha" unit alongside people who went on to be Putin's personal bodyguards, he added.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz admitted Thursday that releasing Krasikov -- who German judges said had carried out the assassination on orders from Moscow -- had not been easy.

In return, Berlin secured the release of five German nationals -- including some with dual Russian citizenship.

- 'Illegals' -

Peskov also confirmed that a Russian couple released from Slovenia were also spies.

Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva, whose two children were sent to Russia in the deal, had been posing as an Argentine couple that ran an IT businesses and art gallery in Ljubljana.

"The children of the illegals who arrived yesterday only found out they were Russian on the plane from Ankara," said Peskov. "They do not speak Russian."

"Illegals" is a term used to refer to Russian undercover spies who live in foreign countries for years, even decades, under fake identities, gathering intelligence to send back to Moscow.

Putin had greeted the children with "buenas noches" -- Spanish for "good evening" -- after their arrival on Thursday.

"They didn't even know who Putin was," said Peskov. "That's how illegals work, making such sacrifices for the sake of their work and their dedication to their service."

To secure their return, Putin agreed to release not only the three US citizens, but some of his fiercest domestic critics who had been jailed for campaigning against him.

- 'Wonderful' -

Russia released three US citizens -- journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, and ex-marine Paul Whelan -- in a deal heralded by US President Joe Biden as an historic "feat of diplomacy".

They touched down in Texas on Friday for medical checks after earlier landing at Joint Base Andrews, just outside Washington.

Their arrival on US soil late Thursday was met by cheers from family and friends as they disembarked a plane, before each embracing Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

In total, 24 prisoners were freed -- eight by the West, 15 by Russia and one by Russia's ally Belarus.

In emotional scenes at the air base, Wall Street Journal reporter Gershkovich was filmed embracing and lifting his mother into the air as they reunited after 16 months in captivity.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty editor Kurmasheva, who also holds Russian citizenship, ran to hug her two children, while Paul Whelan, who spent more than five years in Russian prisons, expressed relief at finally being free.

The United States had denounced the charges against all three of them as baseless.

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A.P.Huber--NZN