Russia has rejected Ukraine’s offer to exchange prisoners for Viktor Medvedchuk, the proRussian oligarch and leader of the main opposition party, who was placed under house arrest early in the war and arrested while trying to escape to Transnistria. But the billionaire, a friend of President Vladimir Putin, could become an important pawn in the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. “The friendly relations” between the tsar and Medvedchuk turn the latter “into a precious trophy for Kyiv, and in the Kremlin they kindle anger and a dangerous desire for revenge,” Volodymyr Fesenko, an analyst at the Penta Center, told the Associated Press. Medvedchuk’s fate, the analyst continues, “will undoubtedly become the subject of negotiations and one of the cornerstones of ‘covert’ agreements between Kyiv and Moscow.”
Medvedchuk chairs the political council of the proRussian opposition For Life party, the largest opposition group in Ukraine’s parliament. The activities of his party were suspended for the duration of the war on the initiative of the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “The war automatically made Medvedchuk an accomplice” of Russia, “since he personally advised Putin on Ukrainian affairs and directly or indirectly influenced many Kremlin decisions,” Fesenko said, after which “Zelensky no longer has to be careful and, by giving Medvedchuk arrests, he wants to show that he is not afraid of the Kremlin and is ready to negotiate, since he has several cards on the negotiating table”.