The highly speculated Russia-US prisoner swap also includes Russian-US journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, former US marine Paul Whelan, and Russian-British politician and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza.
ADVERTISEMENTThe US and Russia completed their biggest prisoner swap in post-Soviet history on Thursday, with Moscow releasing journalist Evan Gershkovich along with Russian dissidents, including politician and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, in a multinational deal that set two dozen people free, officials said.
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 President Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Russian-US journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and former US marine Paul Whelan were also a part of the deal.
In return, Moscow received 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.
Thursday's swap deal is Washington and Moscow's latest exchange in the last two years, following a December 2022 trade that brought WNBA star Brittney Griner back to the US in exchange for notorious arms trafficker Viktor Bout.
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 that Washington regarded as a sham. He was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum-security prison.
Also in recent days, several other figures imprisoned in Russia for speaking out against the war in Ukraine or over their work with the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny were moved from prison to unknown locations.
What happened in the run-up to the swap deal?
Gershkovich was arrested on 29 March of last year while on a reporting trip to the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg. Without offering any evidence, authorities claimed that he was gathering secret information for the US.
The son of Soviet emigres who settled in New Jersey, he moved to the country in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times newspaper before being hired by the WSJ 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.
US officials last year made an offer to swap Gershkovich that was rejected by Russia, and Biden’s 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 travelling to Russia for a wedding. Whelan was convicted of espionage charges, which he and the US have also said were false and trumped up, 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.
Earlier on Thursday, the Kremlin declined to comment on reports of an imminent Russia-US prisoner swap as speculation over the swap grew. Dmitry Peskov, press secretary for Russian President Vladimir Putin, responded to questions with, "No, I still don't have any comments on this topic".
Live flight tracking site Flightradar24 showed a Russian government plane that had previously been used to exchange political prisoners landing in Kaliningrad before flying back to Moscow. It was assumed that the exchange of political prisoners took place on the border of Poland, although this remains unconfirmed.
ADVERTISEMENTThe plane, with tail number RA-61727M, was previously used to exchange Bout, Konstantin Yaroshenko and Nadezhda Savchenko.