Sixteen political prisoners are free — a rare flash of light in an otherwise dark era for Russia. Their release on August 1, 2024, secured through a highly coordinated prisoner swap negotiated by the United States and several European partners with Russia — a diplomatic feat that brought them home — was a triumph of diplomacy and perseverance. But it should also serve as a warning: the fate of more than 1,600 others still imprisoned will determine not only their own survival but the prospects for any democratic future in Russia. Forget them, and we forfeit that future.
Among those freed was Vladimir Kara-Murza, who, almost exactly a year earlier, had stood onstage at the Halifax International Security Forum to accept the John McCain Prize for Leadership in Public Service. The award recognized a truth the world now sees unmistakably: Kara-Murza has risked his life repeatedly for a Russia that respects truth and human dignity. Upon his release, he returned to Halifax once more — not for ceremony, but to continue pushing for a Russia where no one is jailed for speaking honestly.
For years, The McCain Institute and Free Russia Foundation fought publicly and privately for the release of Kara-Murza; Ilya Yashin, a democratic opposition leader; Oleg Orlov, a renowned human-rights advocate; Sasha Skochilenko, an artist punished for anti-war expression; Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, journalists targeted for doing their jobs; Paul Whelan, an American held on fabricated charges; and many others unjustly detained for resisting or simply refusing to validate the Kremlin’s war. Some were our colleagues. Some were our friends. Senator John McCain called Kara-Murza his hero and asked him to be a pallbearer at his funeral — a testament to the bond between those who refuse to bow to authoritarianism.
Sixteen are now free. One — Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who became the Kremlin’s most prominent political prisoner — did not live long enough to be exchanged. His murder in a Russian penal colony in February 2024 — the culmination of years of state persecution that included poisoning and repeated stints in solitary confinement — is a reminder that time is not on the side of those left behind.
The prisoners Russia fears tell us more about Russia than its rulers do
What makes these prisoners dangerous enough to cage? Their existence punctures the Kremlin’s central myth: that dissent is marginal and Russians who oppose the war or the Kremlin’s rule are few, feckless, or unpatriotic. Through their courage, these prisoners have become moral anchors in a society where public truth has been criminalized. They shape the imaginations of younger Russians, challenge the fatalism that enables repression, and embody — however quietly — the alternative Russia that still survives beneath the fear.
Political prisoners are not merely victims of dictatorship. They are the clearest indicators of what Russia could one day become. They reveal which values the regime most fears: honesty, civic responsibility, and dignity. As Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident who spent nine years in the Gulag and later became a global voice for human rights, has written, they are “the partners and prophets of tomorrow.” If the world wants a Russia at peace with itself and its neighbors, these are the people whose voices must survive.
Most prisoners will never become global symbols — and they are in the greatest danger
Russian human rights groups OVD-Info and Memorial estimate that more than 1,732 people are imprisoned for political reasons — almost certainly an undercount. Many are unknown internationally: Alexei Gorinov, Maria Ponomarenko, Igor Baryshnikov, Egor Balazeikin, Zarema Musaeva, and hundreds more. Their anonymity is a punishment in itself.
Consider Gorinov, the Moscow municipal deputy sentenced simply for saying — during a public meeting convened to organize Victory Day celebrations — that Ukrainian children were dying, and Russians should be thinking about peace, not celebrations. For those words, he is now battling tuberculosis in a maximum-security colony, repeatedly placed in solitary confinement, and denied proper medical care. His story is not an outlier. It is a pattern — and it is by design.
Irwin Cotler, a former Canadian justice minister and renowned human-rights lawyer who has defended prisoners of conscience from Nelson Mandela to Natan Sharansky, has written that nothing is more dispiriting to a political prisoner than being forgotten. But beyond morale, memory is a strategy. When the world elevates individual cases, the Kremlin’s cost-benefit calculus changes. When it does not, suffering becomes easier to obscure and abuse more tempting to escalate.
If the world wants a different Russia, protecting these prisoners must become core policy
If we want the release of 16 people to be more than a miraculous footnote, U.S. policy must change.
Congress should:
- Expand and strengthen sanctions against interrogators, judges, jailers, and propagandists who facilitate torture and political sentencing;
- Require more robust reporting from the U.S. State Department on political prisoner cases;
- Fund support networks for families trapped in impossible circumstances.
The Administration should:
- Integrate political prisoners into the center of U.S. Russia policy, not the margins;
- Raise individual names in every diplomatic forum;
- Treat accountability for abuses as essential to any future normalization.
And the public — whose moral pressure has always mattered — should:
- Adopt individual cases,
- Write letters,
- Support documentation efforts, and
- Press elected officials to treat these prisoners as human beings with names, not abstract statistics.
A rare victory should not become an excuse for complacency
Sixteen people now have a chance at rebuilding their lives. But more than 1,600 do not. Many may not survive long enough to see another prisoner exchange like the one that freed Kara-Murza. Their fate is not only a human rights emergency — it is a geopolitical one. A future democratic Russia, one capable of peace in Europe, will depend on the survival and moral authority of those imprisoned today.
History will judge us not by the celebrations we allow ourselves, but by the names we refuse to let disappear.
Let the record show that when their freedom hung in the balance, we did not look away.