LVIV, Ukraine — Oleg Sentsov, a 43-year-old writer and filmmaker recently released from a Russian prison camp in the arctic, should, by the blood-and-soil logic of the Kremlin, have been an easy recruit to President Vladimir V. Putin’s cause of aggrieved Russian nationalism.

In 2014, as today, much of the world’s attention was focused on Ukraine and — at that time — Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Moscow seized from Ukraine. Mr. Putin’s intervention there was met with rapturous applause from many of the residents who, born and raised in the area like Mr. Sentsov, have always spoken Russian, not Ukrainian.

But instead of cheering Mr. Putin as a savior of the “Russian world” — an ever-shifting cultural and geopolitical space that includes millions of ethnic Russians suddenly left stranded in foreign countries by the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union — Mr. Sentsov infuriated the Kremlin by insisting that he and fellow Russian-speakers in Crimea never wanted or needed to be saved.

Pretending otherwise, he said in a recent interview, is nothing more than “political necrophilia,” a ghoulish mission to make Russia great again by embracing the corpse of Soviet power.

For that and other outspoken heresies — all the more potent because they come from an ethnic Russian, not a Ukrainian nationalist — Mr. Sentsov endured five years in Russian jails and prison camps.

He wrote three film scripts while in detention. Russia’s prison camps, he said, have slightly better conditions — more food and less violence — than when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote “The Gulag Archipelago” in the 1960s. But “the system is exactly the same,” he said. “It has one purpose: to create fear.”

His ordeal, much of it spent in frigid camps north of the Arctic Circle, and a global campaign for his release have made the mild-mannered but defiantly determined filmmaker a powerful symbol of resistance to Mr. Putin’s vision of Russia. In 2018, he was awarded the prestigious Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European Parliament.

“By blood and language, I am totally Russian. By birth, I am Crimean. But by spirit, I am Ukrainian. That is the most important,” Mr. Sentsov said during a visit to western Ukraine after his release as part of a prisoner exchange agreed to by Mr. Putin and Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

He declined to say whether his mother, a Russian-speaking pensioner in her 70s who still lives in Russian-occupied Crimea, shared his views. “As a mother, she loves her son,” he said. “That is what matters.” He has two children, a 16-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old son, who has autism.

Set free and flown along with 34 other freed prisoners to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, on Sept. 7, Mr. Sentsov traveled last week to the almost entirely Ukrainian-speaking city of Lviv to present his latest book, written in Russian, at a literary festival and to join a rally in support of scores of Ukrainians still incarcerated in Russia for political reasons.

While in Lviv, Mr. Sentsov was stopped repeatedly for selfies and autographs on the streets of a city that Russian propaganda often presents as filled with fascists frothing with violent hatred for ethnic Russians and their language. A standing-room-only audience at the Lviv Philharmonia concert hall greeted him with an ovation.

The reception, Mr. Sentsov said, strengthened his conviction that the conflict between Moscow and Kiev — a grinding war for control of territory in Russian-speaking regions of eastern Ukraine — is not rooted in any deep divisions of ethnicity and language, but in differing values.

“It is a conflict over values,” Mr. Sentsov said, “between those who want to live like Europeans and those who want to live like we did in the Soviet Union.”

Foremost among the latter, he added, is Mr. Putin, a “totally Soviet person” who, beneath a carefully polished image inside Russia as a tough but enlightened modernizer, “only wants to take Russia back to the past.”

This fact, Mr. Sentsov said, has made it highly unlikely that the recent prisoner swap that secured his release — hailed by President Zelensky, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and many others as an important step toward ending the war in the east — will lead to peace any time soon.

“All wars eventually end in peace,” he said. “But peace between Russia and Ukraine will not happen so long as Putin is in power.”

Born in Crimea into a modest, ethnic Russian family — his father, a native of the Ural Mountains region, worked as a driver before his death — Mr. Sentsov never paid much attention when he was growing up to friends who expressed hostility to Ukrainian rule of Crimea.

He said he did not care about politics and had always been far more interested, particularly after he took up writing and filmmaking, in exploring the inner lives of individuals and how “life is always more complicated and more difficult than it seems.”

His debut feature length film, “Gamer,” released in 2011 to critical acclaim, was shot in Crimea but skirts politics and focuses instead on a Russian-speaking teenager obsessed with video games at the expense of everything else, including his mother and his girlfriend. He eventually breaks his addiction.

Mr. Sentsov was preparing to shoot a second film, “Rhinoceros,” about a thick-skinned gangster who is not quite what he seems, when he got sucked into the protest movement against Ukraine’s former pro-Russian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. He traveled to Kiev in December 2013 to join protesters in a central square known as Maidan and stayed there until after Mr. Yanukovych fled to Russia in late February 2014.

That experience, he said, made him realize just how Ukrainian, rather than Russian, he was in his values. “I never denied being Russian,” he said. “I can’t change the blood of my family. But I understood in Maidan that I’m a Ukrainian and will fight for Ukraine and die for it.”

When Russia in March 2014 sent troops in uniforms stripped of insignia to seize the government building in the Crimean capital, Simferopol, his hometown, Mr. Sentsov left Kiev and went home to try to rally resistance to the takeover. Many residents, including ethnic Russians, he said, opposed Moscow’s land grab but mostly stayed silent out of fear of reprisals by thuggish pro-Russian vigilantes and security officials who flooded into the peninsula from Russia.

“I was shocked at first and wondered, ‘Why don’t we fight?’ We gave up without firing a shot,” he recalled. But after several like-minded friends vanished without a trace, he realized how dangerous, even suicidal, it was to speak up for Ukraine.

Realizing that armed resistance was hopeless in 2014 because Ukraine “had no real army,” he helped evacuate besieged Ukrainian troops, arranging buses to carry more than 1,000 of them to safety on the Ukrainian mainland. But he stayed put himself, determined to show that not everyone in Crimea supported the Russian annexation.

“Under Putin you have three choices: shut up, praise him or die,” he said. He recalled how he expected the latter when, in May 2014, he was seized outside his home in Simferopol and thrown into an unmarked van with his head thrust into a bag by armed men who refused to identify themselves.

They turned out to be Russian security officials, he said, who did not want to kill him, only to terrify him and use him in a propaganda exercise aimed at showing that opponents of Russia’s takeover were terrorists.

Tortured and ordered to confess to belonging to a terror group, he was later taken to Russia, first to Moscow for further, mostly nonviolent interrogation, and then to Rostov-on-Don to stand trial. He said his interrogators offered him a deal: Confess to belonging to a terror organization controlled by officials in Kiev and get a seven-year sentence, or refuse and spend 20 years in jail. He declined the offer.

At his trial, the main prosecution witness against him recanted statements identifying Mr. Sentsov as the leader of a terrorist cell, telling the court he had made them under duress.

The filmmaker declined to plead for leniency because, he told the judge, “a court of occupiers by definition cannot be just. Don’t take it personally, your honor!” The judge gave him 20 years.

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