This week’s exchange of the Ukrainian prisoner Nadezhda Savchenko with two Russian military persons led to debates among opinion formers in Russia.
“Considerably more pluses than minuses”
In a column in Kommersant, the newspaper’s foreign news editor Maxim Yusin saw “considerably more pluses than minuses” for the Russian side.
Although the Savchenko case “lasted unacceptably long,” and “severely damaged Moscow’s reputation in the international arena”, the paper stressed that “Ukrainian society and the West have lost one of the major irritants, one of the most important reasons for criticizing Russia”.
Kommersant predicts that the Ukrainian government will find it difficult to “find a place in the country’s political system for such a popular, but at the same time so radical player”.
Not about recognizing mistakes and crimes
Russian opposition blogger Oleg Kashin, on the contrary, sees the main problems at Russia’s end.
In an analysis, he underlines how the voices in Russia that have stressed Savchenko’s allegedly terrible crimes will have to remain awkwardly silent after the presidential pardon for her.
Kashin underscores the problematic attention the exchange has given both to the Russian military presence in Ukraine and the secrecy around it which makes it impossible for the Kremlin to treat the returning soldiers as heroes.
Kashin ends his analysis on a pessimistic note: “The exchange is not […] about recognizing mistakes and crimes […]. It is simply the exchange of one media person for other two media persons, and, importantly, the Russian captives were turned into media by the Ukrainian side; if it hadn’t been for that, the Russians would simply not have known anything about the Russian prisoners”.