The Kremlin has suggested that Russian assassins could be sent to hunt down the political detainees freed by Vladimir Putin in the biggest prisoner swap with Moscow since the Cold War.
Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president, warned that the prisoners would have to go into hiding after their release, despite having been pardoned by Putin.
“I would like, of course, for the traitors to Russia to rot in a dungeon or die in prison, as often happened,” Mr Medvedev, a close Putin ally, said.
“Let the traitors now feverishly select new names and actively disguise themselves under the witness protection programme,” he added in a thinly veiled threat.
“It’s more useful to bring out our own people who worked for the country, for the fatherland, for all of us,” he said, as he defended the swap, which included a hitman jailed for murder in Germany.
As president, Mr Medvedev pardoned Sergei Skripal in 2010, after the former GRU agent was jailed for spying for Britain. Russian assassins later tried to poison Mr Skripal with a nerve agent in Salisbury.
In Germany, Vladimir Kara-Murza, the British-Russian journalist, refused to be cowed by Kremlin threats after his release in the historic spy swap. “I know I will return to Russia. The day will come when Russia is free,” he told reporters in Bonn.
Mr Kara-Murza, a 42-year-old Putin critic, politician and journalist, was in captivity for two-and-a-half years and was sentenced to 25 years on politically motivated charges of treason in Russia in 2023.
Sir Bill Browder, a financier and anti-Putin activist, fought tirelessly for his friend, who had voluntarily returned to Russia out of patriotism and a sense of duty, to be released in the historic exchange.
He urged the Government to ban Britons from travelling to Russia because of the risk of state-sponsored kidnapping by the Kremlin.
Sir Bill, the head of the Global Magnitsky Justice organisation, told The Telegraph: “Putin is a criminal. It’s a criminal regime. And I think that we should acknowledge it as such, and put policies in place based on those definitions. And one of those policies should be to prevent people from travelling to Russia.”
The Telegraph understands that Lord Cameron, the former foreign secretary, raised the potential release of Mr Kara-Murza with the Americans more than once.
With Berlin’s assent a key part of the swap, he also pressed Annalena Baerbock, his German counterpart, to ensure Mr Kara-Murza was among those freed.
Government officials had long been involved in the discussions to have him included on any potential list as the outlines of a deal emerged.
Roman Abramovich, the former Chelsea FC owner, reportedly relayed a message to Putin broaching the idea of an exchange after meeting with Roger Carstens, the US special presidential envoy for hostage affairs.
A Bulgarian journalist played a key role in the release after jotting down the names of prisoners the US could trade on a cocktail napkin during a meeting with Mr Carstens at a restaurant.
Joe Biden also thanked Turkey for its mediation role in brokering the agreement.
Expert on hostage diplomacy
German experts have also warned of the risk that Putin could start taking more prisoners to use as leverage in negotiations with the West.
A senior expert on hostage diplomacy, who wished not to be named, told the Bild newspaper: “Despite all the joy for the freed hostages and their families, as a state, we must be careful not to open Pandora’s box if Putin starts to arbitrarily arrest and convict people in order to then be able to blackmail our governments.”
Bernd Schmidbauer, the ex-hostage negotiator for former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, added: “We always made sure that the negotiations took place on an equal footing and that we did not make ourselves vulnerable to blackmail in the future.”
The swap has been controversial in Germany because one of the Russian prisoners released was Vadim Krasikov, a notorious pro-Putin hitman, who gunned down a Chechen dissident while speeding through Berlin’s Tiergarten on a bicycle.
Inga Schulz, a lawyer representing the family of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, the victim, said it was “devastating” that Krasikov would be free after just five years in prison.
She said: “On the one hand we are happy that a life has been saved, on the other hand, we are disappointed that the world apparently is not based on law and order, not even in countries where the law reigns supreme.”
Two Kremlin spies freed in the exchange were so deep undercover that their children didn’t know they were Russian until they arrived in Moscow.
The couple had been arrested and convicted in Slovenia of pretending to be Argentinians as they secretly worked for Russian intelligence.
All the freed prisoners, including sleeper agents Anna and Artem Dultsev, and their children, were met by Vladimir Putin, who greeted the youngsters in Spanish: “Buenas noches” (Good evening).
In the US, senior Republicans warned the swap “does little to discourage Putin’s reprehensible behaviour”. Mitch McConnell and Mike Johnson predicted that “the costs of hostage diplomacy will continue to rise” in a joint statement.
France called for the release of French citizen Laurent Vinatier and other people still “arbitrarily” detained in the country.
Russia is delaying exchanges of prisoners of war to destabilise Kyiv, the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre think-tank wrote in a report, another example of how Moscow is using hostage diplomacy.
Russia and Ukraine have conducted 54 successful prisoner exchanges, releasing 3,405 Ukrainians in the process, since the start of full-scale invasion in February 2022.
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