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The United States and Russia completed their largest prisoner swap in post-Soviet history on Thursday, with Moscow releasing journalist Evan Gershkovich and his compatriot Paul Whelan, along with dissidents including Vladimir Kara-Murza, in a multinational deal that freed two dozen people, officials said.
The deal was reached after years of secret and clandestine negotiations, despite relations between Washington and Moscow reaching their lowest point since the Cold War, following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The far-reaching deal, the latest in a series of prisoner swaps negotiated between Russia and the United States over the past two years but the first to require significant concessions from other countries, was heralded by President Joe Biden as a diplomatic achievement in the final months of his administration. But the Americans’ release came at a price: Russia guaranteed the freedom of its own citizens convicted of serious crimes in the West by swapping them for journalists, dissidents and other Westerners convicted and sentenced in a highly politicized legal system on charges the United States considers trumped-up.
Under the deal, Russia released Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was jailed in 2023 and convicted in July on espionage charges that he and the United States have vehemently denied and said were baseless; Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive jailed since 2018, also on espionage charges that he and Washington have denied; and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, a dual U.S.-Russian citizen convicted in July of spreading false information about the Russian military, charges her family and employer have denied.
Among the released dissidents are Kara-Murza, a Kremlin critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who is serving a 25-year sentence on treason charges widely seen as politically motivated; 11 political prisoners held in Russia, including associates of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny; and a German citizen arrested in Belarus.
The Russian side arrested Vadim Krasikov, who was convicted in Germany in 2021 for killing a former Chechen rebel in a Berlin park two years earlier, apparently on the orders of Moscow’s security services.
Russia also received two alleged sleeper agents who were jailed in Slovenia, as well as three men charged by federal authorities in the United States, including Roman Seleznev, a convicted computer hacker and the son of a Russian lawmaker, and Vadim Konoshchenok, an alleged Russian intelligence agent accused of supplying American-made electronics and munitions to the Russian military. Norway returned an academic arrested on charges of being a Russian spy, and Poland also sent back a man it had detained.
Thursday’s 24-person prisoner swap topped a 2010 deal involving 14 people. In that swap, Washington freed 10 Russians who had been living in the United States as sleepers, while Moscow deported four Russians living in their homeland, including Sergei Skripal, a double agent who worked with British intelligence. He and his daughter were nearly killed in 2018 by nerve agent poisoning attributed to Russian agents.
Speculation had been building for weeks that a trade was imminent because of a confluence of unusual developments, including a surprisingly quick trial and conviction for Gershkovich, which Washington considered a farce. He was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum-security prison.
In a two-day trial held in secret the same week as Gershkovich, Kurmasheva was convicted on charges of spreading false information about the Russian military, which was denied by her family, her employer and U.S. officials.
Also in recent days, several other figures imprisoned in Russia for speaking out against the war in Ukraine or for their collaboration with Navalny have been transferred from prison to unknown locations.
Gershkovich was arrested on March 29, 2023, while on a reporting trip to the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg. Authorities said, without providing evidence, that he was gathering classified information for the United States. The son of Soviet emigrants who settled in New Jersey, he moved to the country in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times newspaper before being hired by the Journal in 2022.
He has had more than a dozen closed-door hearings to extend his pretrial detention or appeal his release. He has been brought to court in handcuffs and has appeared in the dock, often smiling for the many cameras.
U.S. officials last year made an offer to swap Gershkovich, which was rejected by Russia; Biden’s Democratic administration has not publicly disclosed any potential deal since then.
Gershkovich was designated as wrongfully detained, as was Whelan, who was arrested in December 2018 after traveling to Russia for a wedding. Whelan was convicted of espionage charges, which he and the U.S. also said were false and fabricated, and was serving a 16-year prison sentence.
Whelan had been left out of previous high-profile deals involving Russia, including Moscow’s April 2022 trade of incarcerated Marine veteran Trevor Reed for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot convicted of a drug trafficking conspiracy. That December, the U.S. released notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout in exchange for the return of WNBA star Brittney Griner, who had been incarcerated on drug charges.
[Associated Press]The article Russia releases US journalist, other Americans and dissidents in massive 24-person prisoner swap first appeared on TheConclaveNg.
