Russia freed US journalist Evan Gershkovich and former US Marine Paul Whelan on Thursday, according to the Turkish presidency. Their releases were part of the largest East-West prisoner exchanges since the end of the Cold War.
The United States and Russia completed their biggest prisoner swap in post-Soviet history on Thursday, with Moscow releasing journalist Evan Gershkovich and fellow American Paul Whelan, along with dissidents including Vladimir Kara-Murza, in a multinational deal that set more than two dozen people free, officials said.
Prisoners from the United States, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway, Belarus and Russia were involved in the swap "carried out" by Turkey's MIT intelligence service, Turkey's presidency said.
President Joe Biden on Thursday praised the US allies who took part in a massive East-West prisoner swap, saying they made "bold and brave decisions" to release people back to Russia.
Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway and Turkey "stood with us", Biden said. "They made bold and brave decisions, released prisoners being held in their countries who were justifiably being held, and provided the logistical support to get the Americans home."
The Kremlin said that Russian President Vladimir Putin had pardoned by decree 12 prisoners, including three Americans, in what it said was a move aimed at returning Russian captives held abroad.
In the statement, the Kremlin said it was grateful to all countries that helped prepare the swap, and to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko for releasing German nationalRico Krieger.
The trade followed years of secretive back-channel negotiations despite relations between Washington and Moscow being at their lowest point since the Cold War after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The sprawling deal, the latest in a series of prisoner swaps negotiated between Russia and the US in the last 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 release of Americans has come at a price: Russia has secured the freedom of its own nationals convicted of serious crimes in the West by trading them for journalists, dissidents and other Westerners convicted and sentenced in a highly politicized legal system on charges the US considers bogus.
Under the deal, Russia released Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was jailed in 2023 and convicted in July of espionage charges that he and the US vehemently denied and called baseless; Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive jailed since 2018 also on espionage charges he and Washington have denied; and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, a dual US-Russian citizen convicted in July of spreading false information about the Russian military, accusations her family and employer have rejected.
Read moreKremlin critic Kara-Murza disappears from Russian jails, fuelling prisoner swap rumours
The dissidents released included Kara-Murza, a Kremlin critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer serving 25 years on charges of treason widely seen as politically motivated, 11 political prisoners being held in Russia, including associates of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and a German national arrested in Belarus.
The Russian side got Vadim Krasikov, who was convicted in Germany in 2021 of 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 US, including Roman Seleznev, a convicted computer hacker and the son of a Russian lawmaker and Vadim Konoshchenok, a suspected Russian intelligence operative accused of providing American-made electronics and ammunition to the Russian military. Norway returned an academic arrested on suspicions of being a Russian spy, and Poland also sent back a man it detained.
Thursday’s swap of 26 prisoners – 24 adults and two minors – surpassed a deal involving 14 people that was struck in 2010. In that exchange, Washington freed 10 Russians living in the US as sleepers, while Moscow deported four Russians living in their homeland, including Sergei Skripal, a double agent working with British intelligence. He and his daughter in 2018 were nearly killed by nerve agent poisoning blamed on Russian agents.
Speculation had mounted for weeks that a swap was near because of a confluence of unusual developments, including a startlingly quick trial and conviction for Gershkovich that Washington regarded as a sham. He was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum-security prison.
In a trial that concluded in two days in secrecy in the same week as Gershkovich’s, Kurmasheva was convicted on charges of spreading false information about the Russian military that her family, employer and US officials rejected.
Also in recent days, several other figures imprisoned in Russia for speaking out against the war in Ukraine or over their work with Navalny were moved from prison to unknown locations.
Gershkovich was arrested March 29, 2023, while on a reporting trip to the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg. Authorities claimed, without offering any evidence, that he was gathering secret information for the US. The son of Soviet emigres 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 had more than a dozen closed hearings over the extension of his pretrial detention or appeals for his release. He was taken to the courthouse in handcuffs and appeared in the defendants’ cage, often smiling for the many cameras.
Read moreRussian court hands 16-year prison sentence to detained US reporter Gershkovich
US officials last year made an offer to swap Gershkovich that was rejected by Russia, and Biden's Democratic administration had not made public any possible deals since then.
Gershkovich was designated as wrongfully detained, as was Whelan, who was detained in December 2018 after traveling to Russia for a wedding. Whelan was convicted of espionage charges, which he and the US have also said were false and trumped up, and he was serving a 16-year prison sentence.
Whelan had been excluded from prior high-profile deals involving Russia, including the April 2022 swap by Moscow of imprisoned Marine veteran Trevor Reed for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot convicted in a drug trafficking conspiracy. That December, the US released notorious arms trafficker Viktor Bout in exchange for getting back WNBA star Brittney Griner, who’d been jailed on drug charges.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and AP)
