Arriving in Germany on August 1, thanks to a prisoner exchange between Moscow and the West, 13 Russian and binational opponents are free, but also emotionally shocked and materially destitute. Released from the Siberian penal colony where he was serving a 25-year sentence, pro-democracy activist Vladimir Kara-Murza was in his boxer shorts, carrying only his Russian identity card, when he regained his freedom.

"Nothing has changed," he said a few hours later, dressed in new clothes and wearing white sneakers on his feet, at the press conference he held in Bonn with two other former prisoners, Ilya Yashin and Andrei Pivovarov. The lack of change was an allusion to anti-Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who, exchanged in 1976 for a Chilean communist, had, likewise, been expelled from the USSR with his identity card alone. Except that, at the time, he had his clothes on.

In Bonn, Kara-Murza said: "All my clothes were taken from me at Lefortovo," the detention center of the FSB, the Russian security services, in Moscow, which he passed through before leaving his country. "Instead of shoes, I had rubber flip-flops that I showered in. The center director said to me: 'So, you're going to wear these.' So I arrived in boxers, T-shirt and shower slippers." So much so, he said, that he envies his comrade Yashin, who was deported in his prison garb and with only "a toothbrush and toothpaste" as luggage.

Of all the prisoners released from Vladimir Putin's jails – 16 in all, 13 of whom were evacuated to Germany – only Kara-Murza was deported undressed. This humiliation was inflicted by the FSB, which sent 20 of its agents to escort the prisoners from their place of incarceration to the exchange point at Ankara airport. This special treatment can no doubt be explained by the fact that Kara-Murza is vice president of Open Russia, the NGO created and financed by the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was once the bête noire of the Russian president, who had him imprisoned for 10 years and confiscated Yukos, his oil company.

Kara-Murza, Yashin and Pivovarov's account of their deportation, explaining that they had absolutely no desire to be exchanged, received little comment on the social media accounts of Russian opposition figures. On the other hand, their first political statements caused a stir. Criticized, mocked and accused of "blindness," the three men were disowned by a large number of Russian opponents in exile. They were criticized for their lack of empathy with the Ukrainians, about whom they said very little, and for their lack of vision, especially when they spoke of the need to "recalibrate" Western sanctions so that they target those close to Putin rather than "ordinary Russians."

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