Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has returned to the US after more than a year in a Russian prison, as part of a complex prisoner swap that was the largest of its kind since the cold war.
Gershkovich, who was arrested last year while on a reporting assignment in Russia, arrived late on Thursday at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, where he was greeted by President Joe Biden and vice-president Kamala Harris, before hugging his mother, Ella Milman.
His release was secured as part of an exchange in Ankara, Turkey, and involved 26 prisoners and seven countries. It was the culmination of months of painstaking diplomacy that also drew in Germany, Norway, Poland and Slovenia, according to security officials in multiple countries. Turkish officials said Belarus was also involved.
“Alliances make a difference,” Biden told reporters at the airport on Thursday night. “They stepped up.”
“It mattered a lot.”
Russia released 16 prisoners under the deal, including Paul Whelan, a former US marine serving a sentence for espionage. Also released was prominent Russian dissident Ilya Yashin, according to security officials from the countries involved.
Biden said the Russians freed from within Russia had been “political prisoners in their own country”.
US national security adviser Jake Sullivan hailed the exchange as “historic”, adding: “Not since the cold war has there been a similar number of individuals exchanged in this way, and there has never, so far as we know, been an exchange involving so many countries.”
Russia also released Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reporter Alsu Kurmasheva, a US-Russian dual citizen arrested last year, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a UK-Russian dual national and Washington Post columnist serving a 25-year sentence for alleged treason and “discrediting the armed forces”. The Kremlin on Thursday issued a decree pardoning all those it had freed.
The Wall Street Journal said: “Evan is free and on his way home. He was released today in a multilateral prisoner exchange that took place in Ankara, Turkey . . . We are overwhelmed with relief and elated for Evan and his family, as well as for the others who were released.
“At the same time, we condemn in the strongest terms Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia, which orchestrated Evan’s 491-day wrongful imprisonment based on sham accusations and a fake trial as part of an all-out assault on the free press and truth.”
Dmitry Medvedev, a former stand-in president for Putin and deputy chair of Russia’s security council, wrote in an apparent reference to the political prisoners that “[one wants] traitors to Russia to rot behind bars or kick the bucket in prison, as has happened often”.
“But it’s more useful to get out our guys who worked for the country, for the fatherland, for all of us,” he added. “Let the traitors feverishly choose their new names and hide in the witness protection programme.”
The swap also included German national Rico Krieger, who had been detained in Belarus and sentenced to death for an alleged sabotage attempt and was pardoned earlier this week, Turkish officials said.
In return, a total of 10 people, including two children, were transferred from the west to Russia. They included Vadim Krasikov, a hitman convicted of a murder in broad daylight in Berlin in 2021.
Prisoners who had been arrested by Norway, Poland and Slovenia for crimes including espionage were also returned to Russia.
Russia’s FSB security service said it had released “a group of individuals acting in the interests of foreign states to the detriment of Russian security” in exchange for the prisoners held in western countries, according to state newswire RIA Novosti. It cited a source as saying that Russia was “completely satisfied” with the exchange and that all sides had kept to their agreements in full.
Gershkovich, 32, was arrested in Ekaterinburg, a city in Russia’s Ural Mountains, in March last year. Moscow claimed to have caught him “red-handed” and said it had “incontrovertible proof” that he was engaged in espionage, but never provided any evidence in public, and the Wall Street Journal and US government dismissed the charges against him as baseless.
A court in Ekaterinburg sentenced him to 16 years in prison in July following a rushed three-day trial. Gershkovich reportedly denied the charges during his secret trial.
Russia detained several Americans in the period leading up to and immediately following its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine in what was widely seen as a hostage-taking strategy aimed at securing the release of the Kremlin’s operatives from prison in the west.
Turkey, a Nato member, has sought to position itself as a mediator between the west and Russia. Ankara refused to join the US and EU sanctions regime against Moscow due to its war in Ukraine, including by keeping its airspace open to Russian aircraft.
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