Russia released Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan on Thursday as part of a multicountry exchange of 24 individuals in the largest prisoner swap since the Cold War.
The deal, which also secured the release of Russian American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist and U.S. permanent resident Vladimir Kara-Murza, represents a rare breakthrough in diplomacy with Russia since relations with the West broke down following the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“Today’s exchange will be historic,” White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on a call with reporters Thursday morning. “There has never, so far as we know, been an exchange involving so many countries, so many close U.S. partners and allies working together,” he added, noting that the deal was the culmination of several rounds of painstaking negotiations over many months.
U.S. President Joe Biden met with the families of Whelan, Gershkovich, Kurmasheva, and Kara-Murza at the White House on Thursday morning to share with them the news of the deal.
In total, 16 individuals all regarded to be held on politically motivated charges, including Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin, were released by Moscow and Belarus in exchange for eight Russians held by the United States, Germany, Norway, and Slovenia.
The exchange took place at Turkey’s Ankara Airport late Thursday afternoon local time. In a statement, the Turkish National Intelligence Organization said it had coordinated the logistics of the exchange and undertook a “major” role in mediation efforts.
Central to the deal was Germany’s willingness to exchange Vadim Krasikov, a high-ranking colonel in the Russian security services who was serving a life sentence for the 2019 assassination of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Georgian national who fought the Russian army in Chechnya.
Russia has long sought Krasikov’s release. According to allies of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Krasikov was under consideration for an exchange for Navalny before the Kremlin critic’s sudden death in a penal colony in February.
Biden raised the matter of Krasikov’s release directly with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, according to a senior U.S. administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the deal. “It all culminated, really, in a call by President Biden to Chancellor Scholz and a follow-on visit by Chancellor Scholz in February, where, basically, Chancellor Scholz responded to the president saying, ‘For you, I will do this,’” the official said.
The official cautioned against seeing the deal as a thaw in relations with Moscow, though. “I would counsel anyone to be cautious in surmising from this that it’s some sort of breakthrough in the relationship or that it portends some sort of detente with Russia,” the official said. “That’s not going to be the case, given what [Russian President Vladimir] Putin continues to do inside Ukraine.”
Overnight, as Russia prepared to release the 16 political prisoners, former Russian politician and Kremlin critic Ilya Ponomarev was injured in an apparent drone strike on his home outside Kyiv. In a post on X, Ponomarev, who was bloodied but not severely injured in the attack, said it was the second night in a row that his home had been targeted.
At least two U.S. citizens were not part of Thursday’s deal, including Marc Fogel, a schoolteacher who was convicted in 2022 for possession of marijuana. The senior administration official said the White House had pushed to include Fogel in this and previous prisoner exchanges and that efforts to secure his release are ongoing.
Ksenia Karelina, a dual U.S.-Russian citizen who was arrested this year and charged with treason for donating $51 to a Ukrainian charity, was also not included in the exchange.
“We are happy to know our friends and colleagues Vladimir Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin, and other Russian political prisoners and U.S. and German hostages have been freed,” said Natalia Arno, the president of the Free Russia Foundation, a human rights group. “However, with the handful of political prisoners released, hundreds more remain behind bars in torturous conditions.” Almost 800 people are currently imprisoned on charges regarded to be politically motivated or on religious grounds, according to the Russian human rights group Memorial, although the real figure is likely much higher.
Speculation began to mount midweek that a prisoner exchange deal was underway as lawyers for and supporters of almost a dozen high-profile political prisoners held in Russia reported that they had been unable to contact them in recent days, fueling suspicion that they were being moved in advance of a swap. On Wednesday, Russian outlet iStories reported that Putin had signed seven classified decrees—possibly pardons—on Tuesday, though Foreign Policy has not independently verified the report.
The massive deal was hashed out and pushed at the working level by the State Department’s Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs (SPEHA), led by Roger Carstens. SPEHA previously successfully secured the release of U.S. Marine Trevor Reed and professional basketball player Brittney Griner from Russia, as well as several swaps with Venezuela that have secured the release of more than a dozen U.S. citizens. Over 70 Americans wrongfully detained abroad have been returned home since 2021, Sullivan said. SPEHA had been working to secure the release of detained U.S. citizens, including Gershkovich and Whelan, through multiple proposals and counterproposals with their Russian counterparts as well as U.S. allies, such as Germany, that had high-value Russian convicts in their custody, before reaching a breakthrough deal in the past week, officials familiar with the matter said.
Gershkovich, 32, was detained in March 2023 during a reporting assignment in Yekaterinburg and accused by Russian authorities of spying for the CIA—charges that his employer and the U.S. government have both strenuously denied—marking the first time since the Cold War that Moscow had arrested an American journalist on espionage charges. He was convicted in July and sentenced to 16 years in prison.
Whelan had been detained in Russia since late December 2018; in 2020, he was convicted on espionage charges and sentenced to 16 years in prison. He has denied the charges. Kurmasheva, a journalist for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was jailed in October 2023 on charges of spreading false information about the Russian military.
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