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Sasha Skochilenko, an artist from St Petersburg who was arrested in April 2022 for protesting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, was among the 16 US citizens and Russian dissidents released to the US and Germany on Thursday (1 August) in a historic prisoner swap in which the Kremlin secured the release of 11 of its assets, among them an assassin and multiple spies.
The complex multi-national exchange negotiated between Washington and Moscow culminated in a Cold War-style hand-off in the Turkish capital Ankara on Thursday. It included the Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested in Russia on espionage charges in March 2023, and was supposed to include Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony earlier this year before the deal was finalised.
President Vladimir Putin personally greeted, with hugs and kisses, a red carpet and military honour guard, the returned Russians, including hitman Vadim Krasikov, who gunned down an anti-Moscow Chechen fighter in broad daylight in Berlin in 2019.
Skochilenko’s purported crime, underscoring how free speech has been suppressed under Putin, was replacing supermarket labels with information about Russia’s destruction of Mariupol, the city in eastern Ukraine that Russia nearly obliterated in the first weeks after the February 2022 invasion began. One label read: “The Russian army bombed an art school in Mariupol. About 400 people were hiding in it from shelling.”
During her trial last year, Skochilenko sought to comfort her supporters and partner by smiling, wearing a rainbow tie-dye shirt with a heart and forming a heart with her hands from the courtroom cage where defendants are held. Her supporters warned the Russian authorities that her medical conditions included celiac disease and a heart condition, which made her especially vulnerable in prison conditions. She was sentenced to seven years in prison last November and was among several political prisoners who were abruptly transferred in recent days, which led to speculation that an exchange was imminent.
Skochilenko’s release was confirmed by her partner, Sonia Subbotina, in a video posted on a Telegram channel run by the artist’s supporters, who said that she had called to say she was exchanged and would be taking off from Ankara for Cologne, the destination for all but one of the released dissidents. Vladimir Kara-Murza, who had been sentenced to 25 years in prison, is a UK citizen and US green-card holder whose family lives near Washington.
In a statement posted on its website, Pen America, which has been advocating for the release of Russian dissidents and foreign journalists, wrote that it “celebrates the release of Russian artist Sasha Skochilenko and continues to urge the release of all writers and artists unjustly imprisoned in Russia”.
The sentences against others who remain imprisoned in Russia are used by the Kremlin to keep others from speaking out. On 8 July, theatre director Yevgenia Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk were sentenced to six years in prison on charges of “justifying terrorism” for a play that had won Russia’s top theatre prize in 2020. It uses a fairy tale to tell the story of Russian women lured into relationships with Islamic State terrorists.
In a case with similarities to Skochilenko’s, another artist from the St Petersburg region, Anastasia Dyudayeva, and her husband were found guilty of placing napkins with anti-government slogans in a supermarket. Also in July, Tatiana Laletina, an anime artist in Siberia was sentenced to nine years on “state treason” charges for a $30 donation to a Ukrainian foundation.
Many members of Russia’s cultural scene have fallen in line and are supporting Putin and the war. In many cases they are doing so by actively denying Ukrainian cultural identity and participating in the appropriation of museums and other cultural institutions in regions of Ukraine that are being occupied or have been illegally annexed by Russia.
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