The United States and Russia completed their biggest prisoner swap in post-Soviet history on August 1, with Moscow releasing journalist Evan Gershkovich and fellow American Paul Whelan, along with dissidents including Vladimir Kara-Murza, in a multinational deal that set two dozen people free, the White House said.
Astonishing in scope, the trade followed years of secretive back-channel negotiations despite relations between Washington and Moscow being at their lowest point since the Cold War after Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The deal was the latest in a series of prisoner swaps negotiated between Russia and the U.S. in the past two years but the first to require significant concessions from other countries, with seven nations agreeing to give up 24 prisoners.
It was heralded as a “diplomatic feat” by President Joe Biden, who called the news an “incredible relief” and said the detainees’ “brutal ordeal was over.”
“Today is a powerful example of why it’s vital to have friends in this world,” he said in an address from the White House while joined by families of four — three Americans and one green card holder — who were released.
But the welcome news was still sure to spark concerns over the imbalance of the deal — with Russia freeing journalists, dissidents, and others convicted in a highly politicized court system in exchange for people the West regards as rightfully charged — and whether it gives foreign actors seeking leverage over the U.S. an incentive to take hostages.
Under the deal, Russia released Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was jailed in 2023 and convicted in July of espionage charges that he and the U.S. vehemently denied and called baseless; Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive jailed since 2018, also on espionage charges he and Washington have denied; and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, a dual U.S.-Russian citizen convicted in July of spreading false information about the Russian military, accusations her family and employer have rejected.
Emma Tucker, the Journal’s top editor, called it a “day of great joy” and said: “I cannot even begin to describe the happiness and relief that this news brings and I know all of you wil feel the same.”
President Biden placed securing the release of Americans held wrongfully overseas at the top of his foreign policy agenda for the six months before he leaves office. In his Oval Office address to the American people discussing his recent decision to drop his bid for a second term, the Democrat said, “We’re also working around the clock to bring home Americans being unjustly detained all around the world.”
In addition to Kara-Murza, a Kremlin critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer serving 25 years on charges of treason widely seen as politically motivated, the Russians released included Oleg Orlov, co-chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights group Memorial, and associates of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Five German citizens also were released, including a German national held in Belarus.
The Russian side got Vadim Krasikov, who was convicted in Germany in 2021 of killing a former Chechen rebel in a Berlin park two years earlier, apparently on the orders of Moscow’s security services.
Russia also received two alleged sleeper agents who were jailed in Slovenia, as well as three men charged by federal authorities in the U.S., including Roman Seleznev, a convicted computer hacker and the son of a Russian lawmaker, and Vadim Konoshchenok, a suspected Russian intelligence operative accused of providing American-made electronics and ammunition to the Russian military. Norway returned an academic arrested on suspicions of being a Russian spy, and Poland also sent back a man it detained.
The August 1 swap of 24 prisoners surpassed a deal involving 14 people that was struck in 2010. In that exchange, Washington freed 10 Russians living in the U.S. as sleepers, while Moscow deported four Russians, including Sergei Skripal, a double agent working with British intelligence. He and his daughter in 2018 were nearly killed in Britain by nerve agent poisoning blamed on Russian agents.
Speculation had mounted for weeks that a swap was near because of a confluence of unusual developments, including a startingly quick trial and conviction for Gershkovich, which Washington regarded as a sham. He was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum-security prison.
In a trial that concluded in two days in secrecy in the same week as Gershkovich’s, Kurmasheva was convicted on charges of spreading false information about the Russian military that her family, employer, and U.S. officials rejected.
Also in recent days, several other figures imprisoned in Russia for speaking out against the war in Ukraine or over their work with Navalny were moved from prison to unknown locations.
Gershkovich was arrested March 29, 2023, while on a reporting trip to the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg. Authorities claimed, without offering any evidence, that he was gathering secret information for the U.S. The son of Soviet emigres who settled in New Jersey, he moved to Russia in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times newspaper before being hired by the Journal in 2022.
He had more than a dozen closed hearings over the extension of his pretrial detention or appeals for his release. He was taken to the courthouse in handcuffs and appeared in the defendants’ cage, often smiling for the many cameras.
U.S. officials last year made an offer to swap Gershkovich that was rejected by Russia, and President Biden’s Democratic administration had not made public any possible deals since then.
Gershkovich was designated as wrongfully detained, as was Whelan, who was detained in December 2018 after traveling to Russia for a wedding. Whelan was convicted of espionage charges, which he and the U.S. have also said were false and manufactured, and he was serving a 16-year prison sentence.
Whelan had been excluded from prior high-profile deals involving Russia, including the April 2022 swap by Moscow of imprisoned Marine veteran Trevor Reed for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot convicted in a drug trafficking conspiracy. That December, the U.S. released notorious arms trafficker Viktor Bout in exchange for getting back WNBA star Brittney Griner, who had been jailed on drug charges.
Gershkovich, Whelan, and Kurmasheva flew from Maryland to Texas and landed at Joint Base San Antonio early on August 2 to begin medical evaluations after spending some time with their family members. If they choose, they can receive treatment the military offers to wrongfully detained Americans.
Convicted felon and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has been quoted recently professing that only he could get Gershkovich and Whelan released, a selling point to justify his re-elected.
While Trump sees himself as a like-minded dictator to Putin, critics voiced disbelief in his claim. Trump was president in 2018 when Whelan was taken hostage, and he remained in Russian custody for the following three years of his dysfunctional administration.
The epic deal brokered by President Biden did suggest that Putin might be finding it in his own interest to look like he might be willing to negotiate on different issues going forward, a reflection of the damage the Ukraine war has inflicted on his own society.
Russia has recently pulled its ships from the Sea of Azov, Russian mercenaries just suffered big losses in Mali, and Russian media reported that the country’s largest oil refinery was on fire.
Putin might also be seeing that Trump’s path to the White House has gotten dramatically steeper in the past couple of weeks. Indeed, Putin’s decision to go ahead with the swap was a blow to Trump.
Gershkovich was a Wall Street Journal reporter when he was taken into custody in March 2023, and the Wall Street Journal covered the negotiations in quite some depth. Reporters Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw, Bojan Pancevski, and Aruna Viswanatha noted that Trump got wind that a deal was coming together and began to insist at his rallies, and in interviews, that Putin would free Gershkovich only for him.
Putin has proven Trump wrong.
That did not, however, stop Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance from claiming that Trump deserved credit for the swap despite Trump’s insistence that Gershkovich would be released only after Trump was reelected.
For his part, Trump did not express any joy at all in the deal, simply claiming that President Biden got fleeced and saying “[o]ur ‘negotiators’ are always an embarrassment to us!”
During the August 1 White House announcement, a reporter noted that former president Trump “has said repeatedly that he could have gotten the hostages out without giving anything in exchange,” and asked President Biden: “What do you say to that?”
“Why didn’t he do it when he was president?” Biden answered.
