Dissidents freed in prisoner swap vow to keep up fight against Putin, recount details of release [Video]

TALLINN, Estonia — When Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza was suddenly moved to a detention center in Moscow from a Siberian prison, he thought he was being taken there to be shot. Opposition activist Ilya Yashin said he was warned by a security operative that he would die in prison if he returned to Russia.

Neither was told they were being freed in a massive prisoner exchange with the West – the largest since the Cold War – when they were put on a bus to the airport Thursday, some still in prison garb.

“It is very difficult to shake (the feeling) of absolute surrealism of what is happening,” Kara-Murza, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who had been serving 25 years in prison, told a news conference Friday in the German city of Bonn.

In their first public appearance since their release a day earlier, President Vladimir Putin’s foes vowed to keep …