Canadian-born ex-U.S. Marine Paul Whelan and American Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich were among 16 prisoners freed by Russia Thursday after the U.S. and Moscow secured their largest prisoner swap in post-Soviet history.
At least eight prisoners were returned to Russia as part of the exchange, including people convicted of serious crimes in the West. Also involved in the swap were Poland, Slovenia, Norway and Belarus.
The Associated Press reported a total of 24 people were released in the swap, while Reuters said the total number was 26. The U.S. State Department has yet to confirm exactly how many people have returned to Russia.
“The deal that secured their freedom was a feat of diplomacy,” U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement. He said Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, a dual U.S.-Russian citizen, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian-British dissident and Pulitzer Prize winner who Biden said holds an American green card, were also being released and were returning to the U.S.
“All have endured unimaginable suffering and uncertainty. Today, their agony is over.”
The deal followed years of secretive back-channel negotiations despite relations between Washington and Moscow being at their lowest point since the Cold War after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Thursday’s trade was first announced by Turkey, whose National Intelligence Agency said it was coordinating flights to return the detainees to their home countries.
The exchange was the biggest prisoner swap since the Cold War. In the last major exchange in 2010, 14 prisoners were exchanged.
In December 2022, Russia traded U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner, sentenced to nine years for having vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage, for arms dealer Viktor Bout, serving a 25-year sentence in the U.S.
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.”
“Through many difficult conversations over the past several years, I told the families of those wrongfully detained in Russia that we would not forget them,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.
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“I know there are many times over those years where they have wondered if our work would ever bear fruit. But I also know that they never gave up hope, and neither did we.”
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 on espionage charges that Washington regarded as a sham. He was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum-security prison.
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 trumped up, and he was serving a 16-year prison sentence.
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.
Whelan and Kara-Murza had suddenly disappeared from view in recent days, according to their lawyers. At least seven Russian dissidents had been unexpectedly moved from their prisons.
Whelan had been excluded from prior high-profile deals involving Russia, including the one that secured Griner’s release and an April 2022 swap by Moscow of imprisoned Marine veteran Trevor Reed for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot convicted in a drug trafficking conspiracy.
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Turkey confirmed 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.
Dissidents inside Russia whose supporters say they have been told that they have been suddenly moved in recent days include human rights activist Oleg Orlov and Daniil Krinari, convicted of secretly cooperating with foreign governments.
In the West, the dissidents are seen by governments and activists as wrongfully detained political prisoners. All have, for different reasons, been designated by Moscow as dangerous extremists.
A Slovenian court on Wednesday sentenced two Russians to time served for espionage and using fake identities, and said they would be deported, the state news agency STA reported, a move a Slovenian TV channel said was part of the wider exchange.
—With files from the Associated Press and Reuters
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