On Thursday, Aug. 1, a multinational diplomatic effort resulted in the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. Six Russians jailed in Europe and the U.S. were traded for 16 detainees held in Russia and Belarus.
Released from Russian custody were Evan Gershkovich, Alsu Kurmasheva, Paul Whelan, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin, Andrei Pivovarov, Oleg Orlov, Sasha Skochilenko, Ksenia Fadeyeva, Lilia Chanysheva, Vadim Ostanin, Kevin Lik, Demuri Voronin, Patrick Schoebel, and German Moyzhes. Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko has also pardoned Rico Krieger.
Perhaps the most well-known prisoner was Gershkovich, an American Wall Street Journal reporter who was jailed on espionage charges while trying to do his job.
Kurmasheva is also a journalist. She works for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Tatar-Bashkir service. The American and Russian dual national was arrested under the controversial foreign-agent law and charged with discreditation of the Russian Army while visiting her elderly mother.
But Gershkovich and Kurmasheva are just two of the 16 people Russia and Belarus detained.
Among the remaining 14 are people like Skochilenko, a disabled lesbian artist with a Ukrainian last name. The Russian citizen was arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison after she replaced price tags in a supermarket with ones that denounced the war in Ukraine.
Skochilenko, like all of the now-released prisoners, was a regular person going about her life. It was her arrest and conviction that turned her into a public figure. Gershkovich was just being a reporter. Kurmasheva was just visiting her mother.
In response to quiet protest, political disagreement, journalism, and other mundane acts, these people were imprisoned in one of the harshest prison systems in the world — one notorious for taking the lives of dissidents.
While we here in the U.S. have more liberty than those in Russia and Belarus, we must remember how close we always are to becoming like those countries.
We must look at these 16 detainees and ask ourselves if we have the guts to be like them — to fight against injustice, to defy oppressive power structures, and to speak out against unjustifiable violence and war.
We must also look at all the people in Russia and Belarus who enabled these arrests, prosecutions, convictions, and imprisonments. It is easy to blame Russian President Vladimir Putin and Lukashenko for this, but we must also recognize that there were hundreds of people along the way who allowed all of this to happen.
In the same way normal people were put behind bars, normal people were the ones putting others behind bars. There are officers, lawmakers, guards, lawyers, and many more people who help Putin’s and Lukashenko’s repression thrive. They too bear the guilt.
The U.S. is not a perfect country, but we do have freedoms that we cannot take for granted. These freedoms we have must be practiced in order to keep them. It is our responsibility to wake up every day and seriously consider whether or not we will protect those freedoms, even if it means facing backlash. We must continuously confront our own individual fears of punishment in order to make each others’ lives better.
These 16 political prisoners have experienced what it means to show resolve and integrity in a place where doing so can be and sometimes is a death sentence. The question is, do we have a fraction of their strength?
Emma Fringuelli is a staff photographer at The Peabody Weekly News.
