President Joe Biden said during a press conference Thursday that the freed Americans will soon be “wheels up on their way home to see their families” from Turkey.
He reiterated that the complex effort relied upon the cooperation of allied nations and it underscored the importance of maintaining strong international partnerships to ensure such deals continue to be brokered.
“The deal that made this possible was a feat of diplomacy and friendship. Multiple countries help get this deal,” Biden said at the White House, standing alongside family members of the freed prisoners.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the deal to get Russia to release 16 prisoners followed “the extraordinary efforts of countless people in the State Department and across our government.”
“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,” Blinken said in a Thursday press statement.
“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.”
Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian-British dissident and has been a contributing columnist at the Washington Post. He has been critical of the Putin government and its decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022.
Russian authorities detained Kara-Murza in April 2022 on charges of working to discredit the Russian military, and charged him in October 2022 with high treason, according to state media.
Kara-Murza continued to contribute columns to the Washington Post while in Russian custody. The newspaper celebrated his release in a social media message on Thursday by sharing his collection of writings.
In exchange for its release of journalists and activists, Russia is receiving from Western nations an assassin and several spies and cybercriminals. They include:
Artem and Anna Dultsev, a Russian spy couple who pleaded guilty to espionage charges in Slovenia where they claimed to be art dealers.
Vladislav Klyushin, who was convicted of hacking U.S. companies and using the ill-gotten information to conduct stock market trades.
President Joe Biden released a statement confirming that three American citizens and one U.S. Green Card holder were among those released from Russia in a prisoner exchange completed on Aug. 1.
In addition to former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, Radio Free Europe journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and activist Vladimir Kara-Murza were released.
In all, Biden said that the United States negotiated the release of 16 people from Russia, including five Germans and seven Russian citizens who were political prisoners.
3 Americans Released as Part of Multination Prisoner Swap
WASHINGTON—Three Americans, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and Marine veteran Paul Whelan, and one American permanent resident are being released as part of a historic prisoner swap between Russia, the United States, and several other nations.The United States and others negotiated the release of 16 prisoners from Russia, including five Germans and seven Russian citizens who were political prisoners, according to President Joe Biden. The other Americans released were Radio Free Europe journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and activist Vladimir Kara-Murza.
“Our organization has undertaken a major mediation role in this exchange operation, which is the most comprehensive of the recent period,” the Turkish National Intelligence Agency (MIT) said in a statement.
Flight tracking site Flightradar24 showed that a special Russian government plane used for a previous prisoner swap involving the United States and Russia had flown from Moscow to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which borders Poland and Lithuania, before heading back to the Russian capital.
The Americans Gershkovich and Whelan were imprisoned in Russia under dubious circumstances, with Russia accusing Gershkovich and Whelan of being spies.
The exchange is part of a larger, 26-person prisoner swap between the United States, Germany, Norway, Poland, and Slovenia on one side, and Russia and Belarus on the other, with Turkey acting as an intermediary between the two sides.
For its part, Russia is expected to receive eight prisoners of its own back, including some with ties to Russian intelligence.
Among them is Vadim Krasikov, who was convicted of murder in Germany in 2019, which the judges in his case described as an assassination ordered by Russian authorities.
Vinnik previously pleaded guilty to money laundering in a case related to the unlawful use of $4 billion in cryptocurrency at the BTC-e exchange, for which he oversaw finances.
That same firm handled Bitcoin transactions for Fancy Bear, a Russian hacking group possibly connected to the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence arm, and which was believed to be behind cyber attacks on the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016 and later hacks on the Ukrainian military.
Russian state media reported that Vinnik was among four Russians jailed in the United States who disappeared from a database of prisoners operated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons.
It named the other three as Maxim Marchenko, Vadim Konoshchenok, and Vladislav Klyushin.
Klyushin, like Vinnik, was also associated with co-conspirators that the Justice department described as being involved in “a scheme to interfere with the 2016 United States elections.”