Political Prisoners

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      Tunisia’s President Cruises to Landslide Re-Election Victory

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      President Kais Saied’s apparent landslide re-election is the latest sign that authoritarianism has returned to the birthplace of the Arab Spring.In Tunisia’s first presidential election since its authoritarian leader began dismantling the democracy Tunisians built after their 2011 Arab Spring revolution, the apparent winner came as little surprise: the incumbent himself.President Kais Saied, first elected in 2019, easily won re-election on Sunday, according to exit polls broadcast on state television.The government had disqualified most of his would-be challengers and arrested his main rival on electoral fraud charges that rights groups said were trumped up. The resulting race recalled the days of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the dictator who ruled Tunisia from 1987 until his overthrow in 2011, rather than the competitive elections of the years in between, when Tunisia was working to develop a full-fledged democracy.Mr. Saied captured more than 89 percent of the vote over Ayachi Zammel, the imprisoned candidate, and Zouhair Maghzaoui, a leftist who had previously supported Mr. Saied before running to replace him, according to exit polls.But turnout was roughly half what it was in the last presidential election, according to figures released by the government commission that oversees elections — the latest sign that the country’s multiplying crises have damaged Tunisians’ faith in a president many once idolized, even though they see no real alternative to him among the country’s weak and fractious political opposition.Mr. Saied leaving a polling station in Tunis on Sunday. Exit polls showed he had won more than 89 percent, according to state television.Ons Abid/Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nicaragua Releases 135 Political Prisoners in Deal Brokered by U.S. Government

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      Among those freed under the deal brokered by the U.S. government were 13 affiliated with Mountain Gateway, an American evangelical church.Nicaragua released 135 political prisoners — including 13 people affiliated with an American evangelical church — on humanitarian grounds on Thursday in a deal brokered by the U.S. government, the White House announced.The prisoners were sent to Guatemala, where they will be processed as refugees.The prisoner release included 11 pastors from Mountain Gateway, a Texas-based evangelical missionary church that the Nicaraguan government had accused of using its nonprofit status as a cover to purchase luxury goods, property and land.The group also included Catholic laypeople, students and others whom President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and the first lady and vice president, Rosario Murillo, considered a threat to their authoritarian rule, Jake Sullivan, the National Security adviser, said in a statement.“The United States again calls on the government of Nicaragua to immediately cease the arbitrary arrest and detention of its citizens for merely exercising their fundamental freedoms,” Mr. Sullivan added.Once in Guatemala, the former prisoners will be offered the opportunity to apply for legal ways to rebuild their lives in the United States or in other countries, Mr. Sullivan said. The Biden administration expressed thanks to the president of Guatemala, Bernado Arévalo, for his government’s cooperation in the deal and for “championing democratic freedom.”The Mountain Gateway pastors were arrested in December after completing an eight-city evangelical crusade that cost $4 million and was attended by nearly a million people. The pastors were sentenced to 12 or 15 years in prison, and fined a total of nearly $1 billion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Prisoner Swap, Echoes of Putin’s K.G.B. Past

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      A sprawling exchange with the West underscored the Russian president’s loyalty to his intelligence services. It also showed his continued interest in making deals.As he sat in a Russian jail for five months, the human rights champion Oleg Orlov sometimes grew wistful: What if he walked free someday as part of a deal between Russia and the West?The chances that President Vladimir V. Putin would make a prisoner swap like that seemed as remote as a “star twinkling far, far, far away on the horizon,” Mr. Orlov, 71, said this week. The dire state of the relationship between Moscow and the West, and their diverging interests, appeared to rule out the kind of detailed negotiation necessary for such a complicated deal.But last week, it happened, in the most far-reaching prisoner swap with Moscow since the Cold War: Mr. Putin and his ally Belarus freed Mr. Orlov and 15 other Russians, Germans and Americans in exchange for a convicted assassin and seven other Russians released by the West. It was a moment when Mr. Orlov saw anew how core Mr. Putin’s past with the K.G.B., the Soviet spy agency, was to the Russian president’s identity — and to the sort of country he’s trying to shape Russia into.The swap happened because “Putin is a K.G.B. man, an F.S.B. man,” Mr. Orlov said in a phone interview four days after two private jets carrying him and other released prisoners landed in Cologne, Germany. Espionage is a subject Mr. Orlov knows well, having spent decades studying the crimes of the Soviet secret police as a co-founder of the Memorial human rights group, which was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.The Russian human rights champion Oleg Orlov, shown in court in Moscow in February, was freed in the exchange last week.Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Putin served as a K.G.B. agent in Dresden, East Germany, in the 1980s and ran the F.S.B., its domestic intelligence successor agency, in the 1990s. To the Russian leader, Mr. Orlov said, showing loyalty to the F.S.B. and other Russian intelligence services by winning their agents’ freedom trumped the political risk of releasing opposition figures whom the Kremlin had branded as traitors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Can Freed Russian Dissidents Help Energize Opposition Movement?

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      The release of activists like Ilya Yashin gives new hope to an movement in which various groups are often at war with each other. But many have doubts.Among Russians who oppose Vladimir V. Putin and his brutal Ukraine invasion, hopes are high that the Russian dissidents freed last week as part of a prisoner exchange with the West will breathe new life into a fragmented opposition force.But if it promises an injection of energy into a movement struggling to effect change inside of Russia, it reignites a question older than the Russian Revolution — where is the more effective place to advocate for democratic change: from a prison cell inside of Russia, or in exile?Either way, the challenge is daunting. For years, decades even, Russia’s opposition has been divided and beset with infighting; the Ukraine invasion has only exacerbated the grievances. And that was before the most influential opposition leader, Aleksei A. Navalny, died in an Arctic penal colony in February.The most prominent dissidents who remained — Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, both freed last week — were serving long sentences, but they gained credibility from their willingness to forego the comforts of exile to speak their minds as inmates in Russia’s harsh prison system.They were exchanged along with Andrei S. Pivovarov, who ran Open Russia, an organization founded by the exiled former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and three regional politicians with ties to Mr. Navalny. Its mission is to support Russian civil society.In an interview over the weekend, Mr. Yashin lamented that he had not wanted to leave Russia, and that his release, which he called an “illegal expulsion,” deprived his words of the moral authority they carried from prison. But his supporters expressed cautious optimism in the days after the exchange, because of his unifying power and that of Mr. Kara-Murza, who won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for columns he had written in prison for The Washington Post.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Says Georgia’s Governor Is Hampering His Efforts to Win There

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      Former President Donald J. Trump suggested without evidence on Saturday that Georgia’s Republican governor was hampering his efforts to win the battleground state in November, a claim that carried echoes of Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat to President Biden there in 2020.“In my opinion, they want us to lose,” Mr. Trump said, accusing the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, and its secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who is also a Republican, of being disloyal and trying to make life difficult for him.At a rally at the Georgia State University Convocation Center in Atlanta, in a speech that lasted more than 90 minutes and that was peppered with grievances about his loss four years ago, Mr. Trump falsely claimed, “I won this state twice,” referring to the 2016 and 2020 elections.Mr. Trump lost to Mr. Biden by roughly 12,000 votes in Georgia in 2020. Last year, the former president was indicted by an Atlanta grand jury on charges related to his efforts to subvert the results of that election in that state. On Saturday, he complained that he might not have ended up in legal jeopardy if Mr. Kemp and Mr. Raffensperger had cooperated with his attempts to reverse the 2020 results.Mr. Trump added that he thought Georgia had slipped under Mr. Kemp’s leadership. “The state has gone to hell,” he said.Representatives for Mr. Kemp, who indicated in June that he had not voted for Mr. Trump in the Republican primary this year, and Mr. Raffensperger did not immediately respond to requests for comment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Long Johns, Forensics and a Bound Russian Killer: Inside the Big Prisoner Swap

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      The complex choreography caught some prisoners being freed in their robes and slippers, unaware of their fates, and required forensic experts to make positive identifications. The private jet that took off from southwest Germany on Thursday afternoon was carrying a group that may have never expected to be confined together: police officers, doctors, intelligence agents, a senior aide to Germany’s chancellor — and a convicted Russian assassin.In the back of the plane, the assassin, Vadim Krasikov, sat with his hands and feet bound and wearing a helmet that covered his face; he was not heard uttering a word on the entire flight.At the same time, a Russian government jet was also headed for Ankara, Turkey’s capital, carrying officers from the F.S.B. intelligence agency and 16 prisoners being released by Russia and Belarus. At one point, one of the F.S.B. escorts made what seemed like a bad joke to the two best-known Russian dissidents on board: “Don’t have too much fun out there, because Krasikov could come back for you.”This account of the tense hours surrounding the exchange — the biggest between Moscow and the West since the Cold War — is based on new details revealed by Western government officials involved in the process, and on early testimony from the Russian political prisoners released as part of the deal. The swap freed Mr. Krasikov, the American journalist Evan Gershkovich and 22 others in a complex seven-country deal that required intricate planning and timing. The successful transfer highlighted the ability of some of the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies to cooperate on a distinct operation of shared interest, even as Russia and the West engage in a tense standoff over the war in Ukraine.A photograph released by the Russian state news media showing the convicted killer Vadim Krasikov, center right in hat, at a Moscow airport on Thursday.Mikhail Voskresensky/Sputnik, via ReutersWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Behind the Deal: Spies, a Killer, Secret Messages and Unseen Diplomacy

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      The negotiations that led to the prisoner swap and the freeing of Americans wrongfully held in Russia required patience and creativity, but gave both sides what they wanted most.A turning point came on June 25, when a group of C.I.A. officers sat across from their Russian counterparts during a secret meeting in a Middle Eastern capital.The Americans floated a proposal: an exchange of two dozen prisoners sitting in jails in Russia, the United States and scattered across Europe, a far bigger and more complex deal than either side had previously contemplated but one that would give both Moscow and Western nations more reasons to say yes.Quiet negotiations between the United States and Russia over a possible prisoner swap had dragged on for more than a year. They were punctuated by only occasional glimpses of hope for the families of the American prisoners — including Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and Paul Whelan, an American security contractor — growing increasingly impatient for their ordeal to end. Those hopes were always dashed when one of the two sides balked.But the June meeting changed things, according to accounts from American and Western officials and other people familiar with the long process of bringing the deal to fruition.The Russian spies took the proposal back to Moscow, and only days later the C.I.A. director was on the phone with a Russian spy chief agreeing to the broad parameters of a massive prisoner swap. On Thursday, seven different planes touched down in Ankara, Turkey, and exchanged passengers, bringing to a successful close an intensive diplomatic effort that took place almost entirely out of public view.The deal between longtime adversaries — negotiated mostly by spies and sometimes through secret messages hand-delivered by couriers — secured the release of Mr. Gershkovich, Mr. Whelan and 14 other Americans, Russians and Europeans imprisoned in Russia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ¿Cuáles son los métodos que usan los gobiernos autoritarios para influir en las elecciones?

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      Al igual que otros líderes autoritarios de todo el mundo, Maduro ha empleado innumerables tácticas para amañar las elecciones en un intento de obtener legitimidad mientras desvirtúa el proceso democrático.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El lunes, el presidente Nicolás Maduro fue declarado ganador en la votación presidencial de Venezuela a pesar de las flagrantes irregularidades electorales, lo que ha sumido al país en protestas generalizadas.La votación se produjo después de que millones de venezolanos apoyaran al candidato de la oposición, Edmundo González, quien sustituyó a la popular líder de la oposición, María Corina Machado, a quien el gobierno de Maduro le prohibió postularse. Maduro fue declarado vencedor por la autoridad electoral del país, que no hizo público el recuento completo de votos, lo que alimentó las sospechas sobre la credibilidad de la victoria de Maduro.Machado calificó los resultados de “imposibles” y muchos señalaron a la interferencia del gobierno en los centros de votación.No es la primera vez que se acusa al gobierno de Maduro de presentar resultados electorales falsos. Al igual que otros líderes autoritarios de todo el mundo, Maduro ha empleado innumerables tácticas para amañar las elecciones en un intento de obtener legitimidad desvirtuando el proceso democrático.A continuación, analizamos cinco maneras diferentes en que los gobiernos autoritarios pueden amañar las elecciones.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More