The prisoner swap carried out on Thursday is the most far-reaching exchange between Russia and the West in decades. Here’s a closer look at some of the people who were released.
Released by Russia
Evan Gershkovich
A reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Evan Gershkovich, 32, was detained by security service agents in March 2023 during a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg, a major Russian industrial hub about 850 miles east of Moscow. Shortly after, he was charged with espionage, the first such case against a Western reporter since 1986.
In their indictment, Russian prosecutors accused Mr. Gershkovich of obtaining “secret information” about a Russian military industrial facility that produces tanks and other weapons. Mr. Gershkovich, his employer and the U.S. government have denied the charges and called them politically motivated, and prosecutors did not publicly offer any evidence of his guilt. On July 19, a Russian court in Yekaterinburg sentenced Mr. Gershkovich to 16 years in a high-security penal colony in a swift trial that only took three hearings to complete.
Alsu Kurmasheva
Alsu Kurmasheva is a Russian American editor working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a broadcaster funded by the U.S. government. She was sentenced to six and a half years in a Russian penal colony for spreading false information about the Russian Army, a broad charge used by the Kremlin to stifle criticism of the war in Ukraine.
Ms. Kurmasheva, 47, had lived in Prague for more than two decades with her husband and two daughters. She was arrested during her trip to Kazan, her hometown about 500 miles east of Moscow. She was first fined for failing to report her American citizenship and then accused of failing to register as a “foreign agent” and put in pretrial detention. In December she was also charged with spreading false information about the Russian Army. The charges were related to a book Ms. Kurmasheva edited that featured 40 Russians who opposed the invasion of Ukraine.
Paul Whelan
Paul Whelan, 54, a former U.S. Marine who had served in Iraq, was attending a friend’s wedding in Moscow at the swanky Metropol Hotel when he was arrested on Dec. 28, 2018.
Mr. Whelan had made several previous trips to Russia, so he readily accepted a flash drive that a Russian friend said contained pictures of his travels. Russian agents then swooped down, claiming the drive held classified Russian military information.
Mr. Whelan is a citizen of the United States, Canada, Britain and Ireland. He was sentenced to 16 years in a high-security penal colony, where he was forced to sew industrial garments and suffered at least one assault by another inmate. He spoke out repeatedly about being left behind while other Americans were exchanged.
Ilya Yashin
A longtime fixture of Russian opposition politics, Ilya Yashin was sentenced in December 2022 to eight and a half years in prison after a court found him guilty on charges of “spreading false information” about atrocities committed by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, near Kyiv.
Previously, he served as the chairman of a municipal council in one of Moscow’s districts and took part in many anti-Kremlin protests. After the death of Aleksei Navalny, Mr. Yashin, 41, is considered to be one of the most popular Russian opposition leaders.
Before his arrest, he spoke about the war in Ukraine on his YouTube channel, often voicing criticism of President Vladimir V. Putin and his “special military operation.” While many Putin critics have fled Russia, especially immediately after its invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Yashin vowed to remain, even if it meant serving prison time.
Oleg Orlov
A veteran activist and human rights defender, Oleg Orlov, 71, served as a leading member of the Memorial, one of the oldest human rights organizations in Russia. Memorial started in the late 1980s as a grass-roots effort dedicated to researching mass purges under Stalin. In 2022, it was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.
Over years, the Russian state grew increasingly wary of Memorial and its members. In 2021, a Russian court ordered it to be dissolved for failure to fulfill its duties as a “foreign agent.” In February, a Moscow court sentenced Mr. Orlov to two and a half years in prison for repeatedly discrediting Russia’s military by voicing his opposition to the war in Ukraine.
Vladimir Kara-Murza
A veteran Russian activist, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for treason, the longest sentence given to an opposition politician in modern Russia. Mr. Kara-Murza, 42, drew the Kremlin’s ire when he lobbied in Washington for the use of sanctions to punish Russian government officials engaged in human rights abuses. In 2024, Mr. Kara-Murza, a Russian-British national and permanent resident of the United States, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in commentary for columns he had written in his prison cell and published in The Washington Post.
Mr. Kara-Murza twice survived what he characterized as government attempts to poison him — both times he was hospitalized in critical condition with organ failure.
Released by Germany
Vadim Krasikov
Vadim N. Krasikov, 58, is a Russian citizen who was sentenced to life in prison in Germany in 2021 for the brazen assassination of a Chechen separatist fighter in broad daylight in a park in central Berlin in 2019. German prosecutors indicated in their case that Mr. Krasikov worked for the Russian Federal Security Service, the most powerful security agency in Russia. The German judge suggested that the killing was ordered by Mr. Putin; the Kremlin denied involvement.
In a televised interview in February, Mr. Putin spoke glowingly of Mr. Krasikov, calling him “a person, due to patriotic sentiments, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals.”
The post Who Are the Most Prominent People Released in the Swap? appeared first on New York Times.
