Aug. 5, 2024, update: This story has been updated to include post-release interviews with Aleksandra “Sasha” Skochilenko and her girlfriend, Sonia Subbotina.

Last week’s historic prisoner swap with Russia made headlines for the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, Russian opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan.

But also among the 16 people freed by Russia on Aug. 1 as part of the largest such prisoner swap since the Cold War was Aleksandra “Sasha” Skochilenko, a Russian artist sentenced to seven years in prison after posting stickers in a Russian grocery store critical of the country’s war on Ukraine. Her story was featured in FRONTLINE’s 2022 documentary Putin’s War at Home, which examined the Russian government’s crackdown on those who protest the war or independently report on it.

Director Gesbeen Mohammad and Sasha Odynova, one of the film’s producers, spoke with Skochilenko on Aug. 4.

“It’s unimaginable what joy I’m experiencing,” Skochilenko told them from Germany, where she landed as part of the prisoner swap deal. “I really feel joy about everything — about trees, about grass — because in prison, I didn’t have many experiences with my senses. So, I touch the grass, the land and the trees.”

But she shared that she is still dealing with trauma from being imprisoned in Russia: “I can’t sleep without keeping the little lights on,” Skochilenko said, adding that loud noises and crowds scared her.

Skochilenko and her girlfriend, Sonia Subbotina, who was advocating for her release, were among the Russians caught in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on dissent whose stories unfolded in Putin’s War at Home. The duo’s experience was also chronicled in Sasha & Sonia: A Russian Love Story, a short film from the FRONTLINE Short Docs series.

“They’re using her to intimidate everyone, to show that nothing can stop them,” Subbotina told Vasiliy Kolotilov, a producer of Putin’s War at Home, in November 2023 after Skochilenko was sentenced. “If someone thinks different, if there’s dissent, the sentence will be enormous.”

Now, Skochilenko and Subbotina — who quickly left Russia as the prisoner swap unfolded — are reunited.

“It feels unreal, because a week ago, I was just carrying on like usual,” Subbotina told Mohammad and Odynova on Aug. 4. “It’s hard to believe that I am with Sasha.”

As Putin’s War at Home reported, the Russian president signed laws that cracked down on anti-war protests following Russia’s full-scale February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Russian authorities arrested thousands of people who protested against the war during its first month. Amid the crackdown, some protesters resorted to subtler ways of expressing their opposition. Skochilenko was one of them. She would pay a steep price for her actions.

“I remember well the day when Sasha was arrested,” Subbotina told FRONTLINE in the documentary. “Sasha left five anti-war stickers in a shop. The precise reason for her arrest was the price label with information about the victims in Mariupol,” the Ukrainian city that came under Russian assault early in the war.

A translation of the sticker reads, “Russian army bombed an art school in Mariupol. About 400 people were hiding there from shelling.”

“The official line is this did not happen,” Subbotina said in the documentary. “So, it’s considered a fake statement against the Russian army and therefore a criminal offense.”

Russian authorities identified Skochilenko using surveillance cameras. They tracked her to a friend’s house, and she was jailed. In footage of her courtroom appearances that was featured in the documentary, Skochilenko was shown in a cage. She was sentenced on Nov. 16, 2023, after being found guilty of spreading false information about the Russian armed forces through the stickers. She denied spreading knowingly false information.

Subbotina told FRONTLINE after the sentencing in November that the duo would not lose hope.

“Me and Sasha made a promise to each other that we will cope with it,” Subbotina said. “We’re sure we will be rewarded for everything and there will be a wonderful life for us when Sasha is out of jail. We have lots and lots of plans for our future.”

Those plans can now begin to unfold for the duo.

“I’ve got many plans, many things to do in art,” Skochilenko told Mohammad and Odynova on Aug. 4. “I finally have my musical instruments. My plan is to live, be loved and to marry,” she said, kissing Subbotina on the cheek. “Sonia is the strongest woman in the world. She is my hero. So this is a story with a happy ending.”

“I’ve never been a political activist,” Subbotina told Mohammad and Odynova. “But my plan is just to enjoy the fact that Russia is not messing with our lives.”

The prisoner swap Aug. 1 also included associates of now-deceased Putin critic Alexei Navalny, journalists, and human rights activists, as well as the high-profile opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza. FRONTLINE has featured Kara-Murza in multiple documentaries over the years. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison in Moscow in 2023 after publicly criticizing Putin and ongoing repression in Russia on three occasions between October 2021 and March 2022.

In an in-depth interview in 2017, Kara-Murza spoke with FRONTLINE about Vladimir Putin’s political rise, being the target of two suspected poisonings, and the cost of dissent inside Russia.

“There’s been a very high mortality rate in the last several years among the people who have crossed the path of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin — independent journalists, anti-corruption campaigners, opposition activists, opposition leaders,” he told FRONTLINE.

In exchange for the release of Kara-Murza, Skochilenko and 14 others, Western countries released eight Russian prisoners, including a convicted murderer and Russian security agent, and a hacker who pleaded guilty to cyber fraud.

Gesbeen Mohammad and Sasha Odynova contributed reporting to this article.

For more on Skochilenko’s story and that of others who protested the Kremlin’s war effort, watch Putin’s War at Home, directed and produced by Gesbeen Mohammad and produced by Vasiliy Kolotilov, and Sasha & Sonia: A Russian Love Story, edited by Brad Manning and senior produced by Dan Edge.

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