On Thursday, multiple planes touched down in Ankara, Turkey, releasing 24 people in a seven-nation prisoner exchange that finally resolved a human drama and diplomatic standoff.
Among those freed were three Americans who had been held in Russia: Evan Gershkovich, 32, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who had previously worked at The New York Times; Paul Whelan, 54, an American security contractor and former U.S. Marine; and Alsu Kurmasheva, 47, a Russian American editor for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. In exchange, Germany freed a Russian hit man, Vadim Krasikov, the prisoner whose release was highly sought by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Mr. Gershkovich had been detained in Russia since March 2023 after being falsely accused of espionage. Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times, has been following the story from both a professional and a personal perspective: He met Mr. Gershkovich in Russia in 2018, and the two bonded over their shared journalistic mission. (Mr. Troianovski, along with other Times reporters, left Russia in March 2022 because of increasing risks faced by journalists.)
When the exchange took place, Mr. Troianovski said he was elated. From his new base in Berlin, he sprang into action, reconstructing how the deal took place and what it meant for future international agreements.
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Troianovski discussed how his reporting came together, and how he covered a story that involved a friend. This interview has been edited and condensed.
When did you think the prisoner swap was a real possibility, and how did you react when it became official?
In the last two weeks, it became clear that something might be brewing. Evan’s trial was sped up, and he was convicted much more quickly than anyone anticipated. Alsu Kurmasheva, from Radio Free Europe, was also convicted the same day. Of course they were going to get convicted in these sham trials, but the Russians needed to convict them, in their way of doing things, before trading them.
As journalists, our first duty is to the truth and to our readers. But we also have to be aware of the human consequences of a story. In this case, we knew we had to be very careful writing about a prisoner swap being imminent. They are such fragile things. If they were to become public before they were completed, forces in any number of countries could cause them to fall apart.
In the grand scheme of this story, writing about the possibility of a swap beforehand would have been incremental relative to the story of the actual exchange when it took place.
Exactly. The day before, there were rumblings that a swap could happen soon. We chose not to report that.
I woke up Thursday having been told by sources that it was going to happen, and our Washington colleagues had been told by sources that it was going to happen. But it was still: Will it actually happen? This was such an extraordinary event without parallels since the fall of the Soviet Union — it was the kind of thing that no one was going to believe until it actually happened.
To have such a choreographed exchange between seven different countries in one of the biggest geopolitical crises between Russia and the West in decades, it was incredibly hard to imagine.
What was reporting on Thursday like, knowing that it was possible?
It was a very intense day even before this all began. We started seeing on flight trackers that Russian government jets were flying from Moscow to Ankara, Turkey. We had the sense that the exchange would, in fact, take place in Ankara. After that, it turned out to be only one Russian government jet.
After it landed, Turkish TV was reporting that there would be a prisoner exchange, but even at that point we were holding back on publishing anything ourselves. The Americans and the others that the Russians were supposed to release were still in Russian custody. The plane could have just turned right around. Then, Turkish officials announced that the swap had happened. It was at that point that we published the story.
The same day the exchange occurred, you and other reporters wrote an incredibly detailed article about how it came together. How did that reporting work?
I made a call to a good source in Moscow on Thursday before Evan was released, a person who I knew would be able to talk about the Russian side of this. And obviously our colleagues in D.C. who were on that story — Mike Shear, Mark Mazzetti, Peter Baker — they have the kind of Rolodex where when something like this happens, they work the phones and get a lot of information really quickly.
You know Evan, too — what was it like to report objectively from that perspective?
This has been going on for 16 months. I’ve never dealt with something like this before. As journalists, we generally try to avoid situations where a reporter is writing about people they know personally. But in this case, the arrest of Evan was so connected to the overall Russia-West, Russia-U.S. conflict that it was really impossible to avoid. I’ve also been open with readers about my relationship with him. I’ve written a first-person story; I’ve talked about my personal perspective on “The Daily.”
It’s a very unusual time in the world, and to be a Russia correspondent. So Thursday was an incredible moment of personal elation. I was keeping it together and focusing on the work throughout the day, but the moment that Turkey made this announcement and we went up with the story that said Evan Gershkovich and others were freed, that was the moment when I did get emotional for a second. It’s this moment that I’d been waiting for, and so many of Evan’s friends and family and colleagues had been waiting for. But then we had to keep going. I’m sure Evan will understand I had to do the news. I was working, but obviously on the side, I was also texting with a group of mutual friends about what an amazing moment this was.
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