When the security officers woke me up in my prison cell in Omsk on the night of July 28, 2024, and told me I had 10 minutes to wake up, get dressed and get ready, I was certain they were going to lead me to a nearby forest and execute me. Instead, they took me to the airport, flew me to Moscow and took me to the Lefortovo FSB prison, where, after several days—we all still had absolutely no idea what was happening—we were taken down into the prison courtyard, put on the bus, driven to the airport, put on a plane and thrown out of the country, sent to Ankara, where the exchange was physically implemented on August 1, 2024.
This is to say that I had absolutely no idea that any of this was even happening. Up until late July 2024, I was certain I was going to die in that Siberian prison. This exchange was a miracle; that is still the only way I can describe it. If you're interested in the intricacies of the process of how this was organized, the two best people to talk about this would be my wife, Evgenia, who spearheaded this campaign, and my good friend, Sir William Browder, who is with us at this hearing today. They are really the leaders of this whole process, both in public and in private. Bill would be able to answer your question much better.
I would say with absolute certainty that the only way our exchange became possible is that, over the two and a half years of my imprisonment, you and your colleagues here made sure that our names were not forgotten. You held hearings. You passed resolutions. You put our names out there into the public domain. Nobody's going to exchange a prisoner if nobody knows that the prisoner exists. I think, as Bill will confirm, the way these lists were essentially drafted.... Also, there were eight countries involved in that exchange. As Bill mentioned, it was the largest east-west prisoner exchange since the time of the Cold War. There were 24 people in total, and there were 16 people on our side, freed from Russia. Eight of them were foreigners, and eight of them, including myself, were Russian political prisoners. The eight people Putin got from the other side were his spies, hackers, murderers and so on.
I believe that the most powerful message that western democracies sent with this exchange was to make sure that it included not only their own citizens, not only the Germans and the Americans.... You know, governments have a legal obligation to advocate for their own citizens. They did not have a legal obligation to advocate for me, for Ilya Yashin or for Oleg Orlov. To me, the insistence of western democracies that the exchange include us, Russian prisoners of conscience, was the most powerful statement imaginable. It was a statement, first of all, of solidarity and support on the part of the free world with all those Russian citizens who were imprisoned for standing up against Putin's dictatorship and against the war in Ukraine.