Three Americans and one permanent U.S. resident were among those freed from Russian captivity on Thursday in one the biggest prisoner exchanges since the Cold War — a feat of dogged diplomacy that involved half-a-dozen countries and took months to pull off.
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was convicted in July of espionage after what the U.S. government and his employer called a sham trial, was released after months of public campaigning by his newspaper, family and fellow journalists from around the world.
The cause of former Marine Paul Whelan, who was arrested in 2018 and convicted of espionage, was championed largely by his family and he was freed after having already served four years of a 16-year sentence in a grim Russian prison.
Two more of the released prisoners are also journalists: Vladimir Kara-Murza, a dual Russian-British national critical of the Kremlin, and Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American reporter with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who is also a permanent resident of the U.S.
Their release came after months of talks by Biden administration officials with their Russian counterparts and with representatives of several other countries, including Germany, Turkey and Poland — and at a time when relations between Washington and Moscow are icy over the war in Ukraine.
Washington has repeatedly accused the Russians of arresting American citizens on flimsy charges to use as bargaining chips to secure the release of Russians being held on far more serious charges.
In 2022, WNBA star Brittney Griner, who had been jailed in Russia for possessing cannabis oil, was exchanged for notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, aka “The Merchant of Death.”
These are the Americans and the U.S. resident who were released in the swap:
Evan Gershkovich
Gershkovich is a 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter who was arrested in March 2023 in the southern Russian city of Yekaterinburg and accused of spying.
The son of Soviet Jews who emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s, Gershkovich grew up in New Jersey speaking Russian with his parents. By 2017, he was working as a reporter in Russia. After stints at the Moscow Times and Agence France-Presse, he joined the Journal in January 2022.
Fourteen months later, Gershkovich was arrested while working on a story about the Wagner mercenary group. He became the first Western journalist arrested on espionage charges in post-Soviet Russia.
Gershkovich, who had been issued press credentials by the Russian foreign ministry, denied any wrongdoing.
President Joe Biden called on his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to release the reporter while Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed the U.S. would do “everything in its power” to bring Gershkovich home.
Gershkovich’s arrest was condemned by journalists across the world, and the Journal pushed hard for his release.
In February, the death of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was announced. A week later, NBC News reported that a deal that could have freed Navalny, Gershkovich and Whelan had already been in the works.
Then, in May, Gershkovich’s plight became a campaign issue when former President Donald Trump claimed that if he was elected he could convince Putin to free him.
His head shaved, Gershkovich went on trial in June on charges of collecting secret defense industry information for U.S. intelligence services.
Jay Conti, executive vice president and general counsel for Dow Jones, the publisher of the Journal, called the allegations “bogus.”
“He was an accredited journalist doing journalism, and this is a sham trial, bogus charges that are completely trumped up,” Conti told The Associated Press.
But in July, Gershkovich was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum security prison.
Paul Whelan
The 54-year-old former Marine had been held the longest by the Russians.
Born in Canada to British parents, Whelan worked as a police officer in Michigan before he enlisted in 1994. He wound up serving multiple tours in Iraq, according to his brother David Whelan.
Whelan was working as the head of global security for an auto parts supplier in Michigan when he was arrested in 2018 while he was in Moscow attending a wedding.
David Whelan said his brother had made several previous trips to Russia and had no idea why he was taken into custody.
The Trump administration protested Whelan’s arrest, but in 2020 he was sentenced to 16 years in prison.
In a December 2023 interview with the BBC, Whelan said he felt “abandoned.” This was a month after his brother reported that Whelan had been punched in the face by another inmate.
“I know the U.S. have all sorts of proposals, but it’s not what the Russians want,” Whelan said. “So they go back and forth, like throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks.”
The next month, Biden met with Whelan’s sister and spoke with his parents to assure them that the U.S. was trying to free Whelan.
“Since the beginning of the Administration, the President has been personally engaged in the effort to secure the release of Americans held hostage and wrongfully detained around the world, including Paul Whelan and fellow American Evan Gershkovich,” the White House said in a statement.
Vladimir Kara-Murza
Russia-born Kara-Murza, 42, had been imprisoned since 2022 on charges of treason and spreading false information about the military following Russia’s war in Ukraine. He rejected the charges, claiming he was politically targeted because of his connection with another Putin critic, and was sentenced last year to 25 years in prison.
Kara-Murza has also had British citizenship since he was a teenager after his mother married an Englishman.
In May, Kara-Murza was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary as a contributor for The Washington Post. The judges honored him “for passionate columns written under great personal risk from his prison cell, warning of the consequences of dissent in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and insisting on a democratic future for his country.”
In his most recent column in June, Kara-Murza described his time in captivity in a maximum-security prison in Siberia and defiance in being labeled a “foreign agent” by the Russian government, which meant he was poised to face another criminal trial this fall.
“It seems that my current 25-year sentence will not be the limit,” he wrote.
Alsu Kurmasheva
Kurmasheva had been working as a reporter for U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty when she was arrested in October by the Russians.
The 47-year-old reporter had been visiting family in her native Russian region of Tatarstan.
A Russian court initially found her guilty of failing to declare that she had a U.S. passport, mandatory under Russian law, and fined her. But a week later, she was charged with failing to register as a “foreign agent.”
Kurmasheva pleaded not guilty.
Meanwhile, her husband Pavel Butorin, who also works for RFE/RL, wrote on X: “My daughters and I know Alsu has done nothing wrong. And the world knows it too. We need her home.”
Butorin has said his wife’s arrest was related to a book that she had edited entitled “Saying No to War. 40 Stories of Russians Who Oppose the Russian Invasion of Ukraine”.
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