In a multinational agreement that freed 24 people, Moscow released journalist Evan Gershkovich and fellow American Paul Whelan along with dissidents like Vladimir Kara-Murza, marking the conclusion of the largest prisoner swap between the US and Russia in post-Soviet history on Thursday, according to officials.
Since the Cold War ties between Washington and Moscow were at an all-time low after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Nevertheless, years of covert backchannel conversations preceded the exchange.
The large-scale agreement, which was the first to call for major concessions from other nations among the prisoner swaps that the United States and Russia had arranged in the previous two years, was hailed as a diplomatic triumph by President Joe Biden in the latter months of his presidency.
However, the Americans’ release has come at a cost: in exchange for journalists, dissidents, and other Westerners found guilty and sentenced in a highly politicized legal system on allegations the United States believes to be false, Russia has secured the freedom of its own nationals convicted of serious crimes in the West.
Under the terms of the agreement, Russia freed Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive jailed since 2018 on espionage charges he and Washington have denied, and Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who is dual citizen of the United States and Russia and was found guilty in July of spreading false information about the Russian military that is denied by her family and employer. Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was jailed in 2023 and found guilty in July of espionage charges that he and the US have strongly denied and called it without a base.
Among the dissidents freed were Kara-Murza, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and Kremlin critic who had been imprisoned for 25 years on treason charges that were largely believed to be politically motivated; 11 political prisoners in Russia, including aides to the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny; and a German national who had been detained in Belarus.
The Russian side received Vadim Krasikov after he was found guilty in Germany in 2021 of killing a former Chechen rebel in a Berlin park, allegedly at the orders of Moscow’s secret agencies.
Along with three men prosecuted by federal authorities in the United States—including Vadim Konoshchenok, a suspected Russian intelligence agent charged with supplying the Russian military with ammunition and technology produced in the United States, and Roman Seleznev, a convicted computer hacker and a Russian lawmaker’s son. Russia also acquired two alleged sleeper spies who were imprisoned in Slovenia.
