Analysis | After a Historic Exchange of Prisoners, What’s Next?

Sometimes, when the good guys win, triumphs deserve to be savored.

The August 2 press conference in Bonn, Germany, where three just-freed political prisoners—Vladimir Kara-Murza, Andrei Pivovarov and Ilya Yashin—spoke to the press and supporters, is a reminder that there is more to Russia than Vladimir Putin and his odious regime.

Like all 16 prisoners released by Russia in last week’s historic prisoner swap, these men were taken hostage by the brigands in the Kremlin, dragged through a semblance of a legal procedure and sent off to prison camps from which they didn’t expect to emerge.

But these three were also Russian-born politicians, political dissidents who fell afoul of Putin’s regime after criticizing the invasion of Ukraine.

Throughout this ordeal, all three have said they received thousands of postcards and letters from Russian citizens they didn’t know. Signed and containing return addresses, these letters and postcards can lead to prosecution under the same articles of the Russian Criminal Code that were used to prosecute the prisoners to whom these letters are addressed.

Each of these pieces of correspondence is a reminder that Putin’s program of beating Russian society into submission hasn’t worked.

Undoubtedly, contracts for books about last week’s prisoner exchange are getting inked right now, since the story features a veritable parade of larger-than-life characters, good, bad and sickening. The spectacle of Putin’s hostages being exchanged for Russian operatives—including, notably, a cold-blooded murderer linked to the Federal Security Service (FSB) espionage services, plus several others whose FSB affiliation was revealed after they returned—harkens back to the prisoner exchanges of the 1970s and 1980s.

The apparent parallels to Cold War prisoner exchanges raise a tantalizing question: Is Putin finally caving in to pressure from the West, as his Soviet forebears did, before their regime finally imploded? Could it be that sanctions against Russia are having an effect and Putin’s regime is starting to bend?

These questions matter because thousands more people remain in Russia’s prisons or are facing repressions from

Read the full article at Moment Magazine.