The assassination took place in broad daylight in a downtown Berlin park. The Russian gunman pedalled up on a bicycle before shooting a former Chechen separatist fighter in the head as children and their parents looked on.
Vadim Krasikov, the man sentenced to life in prison in Germany for that brazen 2019 killing, was later described as a patriot by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
On Thursday, he was freed as part of the largest prisoner exchange between Russia and the West since the Cold War. In total, three Americans — Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter; Alsu Kurmasheva, another journalist, and Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine and corporate security executive — were among the 16 people who were freed in the deal. The deal also included numerous Russian political dissidents that the Kremlin released from jail, while Western nations traded eight Russian prisoners.
Mr. Krasikov, in his late 50s, appeared to be the linchpin of the multifaceted deal, since Mr. Putin himself indicated that was whom he wanted.
In a television interview last February, Mr. Putin noted that the intelligence services of the United States and Russia were in contact concerning Mr. Gershkovich and that an agreement was possible “if our partners take reciprocal steps.”
Mr. Putin did not mention Mr. Krasikov by name, but it was clear whom he was talking about when he said “a person, due to patriotic sentiments, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals,” adding that the events were linked to matters in the Caucasus.
The man shot dead, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, 40, was an ethnic Chechen from Georgia who had commanded a militia during the separatist wars in Chechnya. Mr. Khangoshvili had moved to Germany with his family after several failed assassination attempts against him in Georgia.
The German judge in the case suggested that the assassination order that Mr. Krasikov had carried out could have come from Mr. Putin himself, an assertion that Russia rejected. Russia passed a law in 2006 allowing for the extrajudicial killing abroad of those it considers extremists or terrorists.
After stalking and shooting his victim in Tiergarten Park, Mr. Krasikov threw his bike, his Glock pistol and a bag containing his disguise into the Spree River, the court found. Witnesses called the police, who arrested him nearby, and investigators found his fingerprints on some of the items retrieved by police divers.
Mr. Krasikov denied the killing, never wavering from his story that he was a mere tourist named Vadim A. Sokolov, the name on his Russian passport. That kind of loyalty is much prized by Mr. Putin, himself a former K.G.B. agent who was once stationed in Berlin. So in Thursday’s prisoner exchange, there was also an element of rescuing a colleague in the trade.
Mr. Krasikov’s real identity was finally established using photographs that showed his distinctive tattoos. In detailing the case, German prosecutors indicated that Mr. Krasikov worked for the Federal Security Service — Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, previously known as the K.G.B. — in a secretive department that undertakes assassinations and other clandestine operations outside Russia.
After Mr. Krasikov was convicted, Germany, annoyed by the lack of Russian cooperation with the case and repeated denials of official involvement, expelled two Russian diplomats.
Zurab Khangoshvilli, the brother of the assassinated man, said in an interview that he had long tracked Russia’s attempts to free Mr. Krasikov. Mr. Khangoshvilli, who lives in Germany but said his family has been denied asylum there, called the case “business as usual” for the Russian security services.
“They send people anywhere to kill, then they catch innocent people to trade and it works out for them,” he said. Keeping Mr. Krasikov in prison would break the pattern, he said, but added that he would not object to the swap: “If he is exchanged and causes innocent people to be released, I will be happy.”
A possible swap for Mr. Krasikov had emerged in the case of Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s main opposition figure, who died suddenly in a Russian penal colony in February. After his death, his associates said talks had been underway to exchange Mr. Navalny and a couple of American prisoners in Russia for Mr. Krasikov.
On Thursday, President Biden said the cooperation from Olaf Sholz, the German chancellor, in agreeing to release Mr. Krasikov, had been a crucial element in the diplomatic negotiations.
Russia had said repeatedly that no deal of any kind for the release of Mr. Gershkovich, 32, was possible until he had been sentenced. Espionage trials in Russia usually take months, but his was lightning quick, concluding within a month. The trial of Ms. Kurmasheva, the Russian American editor for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, ended in a similarly rapid manner.
Ivan Pavlov, a Russian lawyer who specialized in espionage and other sensitive cases before fleeing the country, said the speed with which Mr. Gershkovich’s case was concluded — with only two court hearings and no apparent defense — suggested that some sort of fix was already in the works.
“The fact that all of them wanted a quick procedure means that they all knew something, even if they could not say it publicly,” Mr. Pavlov said. Espionage cases are heard in secret, which meant that no details were released and the lawyers were barred from commenting.
Mr. Gershkovich was sentenced on July 19 to 16 years in prison on what were widely considered fabricated espionage charges. On the same day, Ms. Kurmasheva was sentenced to six and a half years after being found guilty of spreading “false information” and failing to register as a foreign agent.
Thursday’s exchange also brought the release of Mr. Whelan, who was given a 16-year sentence on espionage charges that the United States also called politically motivated. He was arrested in a Moscow hotel in December 2018.
Prisoner exchanges between Russia and the West date back more than 60 years, to the height of the Cold War, although swaps involving large numbers of incarcerated people have been rarer. One exchange in 1985 involved 29 people, including 23 Westerners. The most recent group release was in July 2010, when the United States freed 10 Russians it had recently rounded up, while Moscow let four people go.
That exchange, which took place on the tarmac of Vienna International Airport, included Anna Chapman, a socialite in Manhattan convicted of being a sleeper agent. The Russians released Igor V. Sutyagin, a Russian nuclear scientist; and Sergei Skripal, a former colonel in Russia’s military intelligence. Russian secret agents then tried and failed to poison him in 2018, although a British woman died in that effort.
The overall deal for those released on Thursday was part of what experts believe is a more pronounced effort by the Kremlin to engage in what some call “hostage diplomacy.”
“It’s effectively a hostage-taking under the color and guise of law,” said Danielle Gilbert, a political science professor at Northwestern University who studies the method. “It’s a practice that seems to be on the rise in recent years and, in particular, a newly favored tactic of Putin’s Russia.”
The practice will most likely only grow, she warned, since governments rather than terrorist groups are turning to hostage-taking.
“It is an asymmetric tool of adversaries around the world who want to get things from the United States but want to avoid resorting to full-scale, open conflict with it,” she said.
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