Three Americans including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan returned to American soil late Aug. 1 after an extensive prisoner swap with Russia.
A total of 24 prisoners have been exchanged as a result of negotiations between eight countries, including Turkey who acted as the mediator in what has been described as the largest prisoner swap between East and West since the cold war.
Gershkovich, 32, Whelan, and Radio Free Europe journalist Alsu Kurmasheva arrived at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland shortly before midnight and were greeted by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris before a cheering crowd.
They met with family members and wandered around on the tarmac before being escorted to Brooke Army Medical Centre in Texas for a medical check-up.
All three Americans vehemently deny charges that were brought against them by Russia, with Moscow accusing Gershkovich and Whelan of spying and Kurmasheva of spreading false information about the Russian military.
The White House said that the trade had been worked on in secrecy for more than a year, and was negotiated between the United States, Germany, Norway, Poland, and Slovenia on one side with Russia and Belarus on the other: 16 prisoners moving from Russia to the West and eight sent back to Russia from the West.
A fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is a U.S. green card holder, was also among those released.
The other prisoners were Russian and German nationals: Dieter Voronin, Kevin Lick, Rico Krieger, Patrick Schoebel, Herman Moyzhes, Ilya Yashin, Liliya Chanysheva, Kseniya Fadeyeva, Vadim Ostanin, Andrey Pivovarov, Oleg Orlov, Sasha Skochilenko were released to Germany.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died under mysterious circumstances in a Russian prison in the Arctic earlier in the year, was intended to be part of the exchange.
Three of the prisoners released by Russia, Yashin, Chanysheva, and Fadeyeva, previously served as regional office heads for Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, which is now run by his wife, Yulia Navalnaya.
On the Russian side, the most prominent of prisoners released was Russian agent Vadim Krasikov, who was convicted for the 2019 murder of a Chechen rebel in Berlin, which the judges in his case described as an assassination ordered by Russian authorities.
The office of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stated that it was not easy to free a “murderer” such as Krasikov but that it was necessary to secure the liberty of those detained in Russia.
Other prisoners were from Slovenia: Artem Viktorovich Dultsev, Anna Valerevna Dultseva, from Norway: Mikhail Valeryevich Mikushin, from Poland: Pavel Alekseyevich Rubtsov, and from the United States: Roman Seleznev, Vladislav Klyushin, and Vadim Konoshchenock.
U.S. officials made clear on Aug. 1 that the prisoner swap was not an indication of progress in any other realm of U.S.–Russian relations.
