The top-secret negotiations, the hushed rumours and the planes converging on Ankara, a third-country location that was kept secret until the final moment. There was much cold war-style intrigue in the buildup to Thursday’s prisoner exchange, the latest in a long line of swaps between Moscow and the west that dates back to the cold war.
It started on a cold and clear morning in February 1962, when two groups of people gathered at each end of the narrow Glienicke Bridge, separating West Berlin and East Germany. On one side, they were dressed in US military police trenchcoats; on the other in Soviet-issue fur hats. The Russian spy Rudolf Abel walked across the bridge towards the Soviet side; American pilot Gary Powers, arrested in the Soviet Union, walked past him towards West Germany.
That exchange was one of the first of numerous regular swaps between the Soviet Union and the west. The practice continued even beyond the end of the cold war, with a major swap in 2010 involving 10 Russian spies arrested in America swapped for four Russians accused of spying for the west, in an exchange that took place at Vienna airport.
On the surface, the exchange on Thursday shares some similarities with the Abel-Powers swap 62 years ago. On one side, Thursday marked the return to Moscow of several “illegals” who, like Abel, spent years posing as foreign citizens in the west while all the while spying for Moscow. On the other side was the journalist Evan Gershkovich and the former US marine Paul Whelan, both jailed in Russia for espionage.
In reality, though, this exchange is very different to the spy-for-spy swaps of the cold war, and not just because of its size. Then, there was an understanding that both sides were engaging in spying on the other, and spy swaps were part of an informal agreement to make sure neither side’s operatives spent decades rotting in jail.
But Thursday’s exchange was hardly one of like-for-like intelligence warriors. Gershkovich was a journalist doing his job; Whelan, too, has always denied the charges against him. Most observers agree that Russia has activated a policy of taking western prisoners as hostages, specifically to exert pressure to secure the release of its own prisoners abroad.
Additionally, the west has moved to free a number of Russian opposition politicians, jailed for their outspoken criticism of Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine, or for their longstanding opposition to the Kremlin. Soviet dissidents were rarely part of exchanges, and certainly never on this scale.
Even the briefest glance at the biographies of those swapped on Thursday shows this exchange is different. Journalists, opposition politicians and those who have fallen foul of Russia’s brutal treason laws were swapped for assassins, spies and criminals.
Compare Aleksandra Skochilenko, freed from a Russian prison, with Vadim Krasikov, released from Germany. Ostensibly, they are both “criminals”, but Skochilenko’s crime was to replace supermarket price tags with messages opposing Russia’s war in Ukraine. Krasikov was convicted of shooting a man dead in broad daylight.
The location of the exchange on Thursday, in Ankara, was also telling. During the cold war, divided Berlin was the usual venue for such exchanges, taking place either on one of the bridges diving the city or in the Friedrichstraße underground station, another crossing point, with the swapped people scurrying past each other on the platform.
This time, Germany was one of the key players in the exchange, being persuaded to give up the Tiergarten killer Krasikov, Vladimir Putin’s number one prize. Turkey, which has played a role in previous exchanges of Ukrainian and Russian prisoners of war, stepped in as the more-or-less neutral broker.
• This article and subheading were amended on 2 August 2024. An earlier version said that Glienicke Bridge separated West and East Berlin when in fact it separated West Berlin and East Germany.
