In one of the biggest exchanges yet seen between Russia and the west, some 24 prisoners and two children held in Russia, Belarus, the US, Germany and Slovenia, have returned home. Three of them were US citizens, with eight Russian nationals going back to Moscow, in a deal in which US president Joe Biden had a big hand.
Those swapped included Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich (32), sentenced 10 days ago to 16 years hard labour on concocted espionage charges, and – on the other side of the deal – Vadim Krasikov, a colonel in Russia’s FSB intelligence service serving life in Germany for the 2019 murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Georgian-born Chechen dissident, in a Berlin Park.
US Marine veteran Paul Whelan - who holds an Irish passport - and Russian-American radio journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, from US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, both in jail in Russia also on spying charges or for failing to register as a foreign agent, were also part of the complex swap which took place in Ankara. The radio station says three more of its journalists remain in custody in Belarus and Crimea.
Gershkovich was arrested in March of last year while reporting in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, accused of spying for the CIA. He and the Journal vehemently rejected the accusations. Whelan was detained in 2018 and sentenced to 16 years in 2020 on spying charges which he denies.
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Sentencing Krasikov in 2021, meanwhile, a Berlin court called the killing “state-ordered murder”. Putin recently described him in an interview with a western journalist as a “patriot” serving a life sentence in a “US-allied country” after being convicted of “liquidating a bandit”. It is reported that Germany had initially been reluctant to accede to US requests to participate in a swap involving what they saw as a dangerous killer
These exchanges are not like-for-like – Russia has long been involved in what is effectively a cynical exercise in hostage-taking to exchange for its captured agents abroad. Despite a change in regime, the playbook is pure Cold War, a measure some would say of how Putin’s Russia operates.