By Daria Shamonova, Filipp Lebedev and Mark Trevelyan
BERLIN (Reuters) – Dissidents freed from Russian jails under a prisoner swap between Russia and the West last week have discussed the possibility of further exchanges, veteran rights campaigner Oleg Orlov said on Wednesday.
Orlov was speaking in Berlin at his first press conference since being released from a Russian penal colony as part of the deal, the biggest of its kind since the Cold War.
The 71-year-old said he and the other freed Russians had already talked about the possibility of a follow-up exchange to win the release of more of their colleagues by Moscow.
“We had a conversation about the details among those who were exchanged, on the plane, when we were flying from Ankara to Germany,” Orlov said.
“But I can’t say anything more concrete for now because you understand that any talks about an exchange require confidentiality for a long time. I will only say that there are concrete ideas, I won’t say anything more.”
Under last week’s deal, Russia got back eight prisoners held in the West, including a member of its FSB security service convicted of murder in Germany, and 16 people were released from Russian and Belarusian jails. They included Orlov, dissidents Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, and U.S. citizens Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan and Alsu Kurmasheva.
Rights campaigners say hundreds of political prisoners remain in Russia. Apart from the conversation between those just released, Orlov did not say who else was involved in any discussions about a further swap.
Orlov is a co-chair of the rights group Memorial, which was banned in Russia in 2021 but won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize the following year.
He was serving a two-and-a-half year sentence after being convicted in February of discrediting Russia’s armed forces by protesting against the war in Ukraine and accusing President Vladimir Putin of leading a descent into fascism.
Like Yashin and Kara-Murza, he said that prior to his release last week he had refused to sign a letter seeking a pardon from Putin.
Orlov said that Memorial “cannot be destroyed” and that he would continue from outside Russia to work for the release of more prisoners.
(Reporting by Daria Shamonova in Berlin and Mark Trevelyan and Filipp Lebedev in London; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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