Freed Russian dissident put on Moscow’s ‘wanted’ list

Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin, who was released in a prisoner swap by Moscow in August, has been placed on Russia’s “wanted” list, according to an interior ministry database seen by AFP Wednesday.

“Wanted under a criminal code article,” reads the website, along with a photograph of Yashin and his date and place of birth.

The former Moscow councillor is also labelled as a “foreign agent”, a designation typically applied to opponents of President Vladimir Putin.

Yashin, 41, was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison at the end of 2022 for denouncing “the murder of civilians” in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.

The liberal sat on Moscow’s city council at the time and had fought alongside opposition figures like Alexei Navalny, who died in detention in February 2024, and Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in 2015.

Yashin was released on August 1 as part of a historic prisoner exchange between Russia and the West, alongside other Russian opposition figures and American journalist Evan Gershkovich, a former AFP Moscow correspondent.

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Yashin said he had not wanted to leave Russia even for freedom, saying such exchanges “encourage Putin to take more hostages”.

“I understood my imprisonment not only as a fight against the war but also as a fight for my right to live in my country and to pursue an independent political agenda,” he said during a press conference in Germany.

Since then, he has been involved in the Russian opposition movement in exile, taking part in a protest against the conflict in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin in Berlin in November.

Russia’s wanted persons list is extensive and includes both Russian and foreign personalities, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.