August 1, 2024
Russia freed American Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and others on Thursday, August 1, in the biggest prisoner swap deal between tWashington, D.C., and Moscow since the end of the Cold War, with a Russian assassin heading back to his homeland as part of the arrangement, reports The Daily Beast.
As well as Gershkovich, fellow American and former U.S. marine Paul Whelan was confirmed to be part of the deal. Russian-American radio reporter Alsu Kurmasheva also was reported to be included, according to CBS News.
Bloomberg separately cited a European official in reporting that Vladimir Kara-Murza, a British-Russian dissident, would be released. Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment in April 2023 on treason and other charges after speaking out against the war in Ukraine.
While the agreement saw the release of Western journalists and dissidents who had originally been locked up on charges that the United States considered baseless, Russian President Vladimir Putin secured the release of his own countrymen and others who had been convicted of major crimes.
Among them was Krasikov, a colonel in Russia’s FSB security service. Krasikov was serving a life sentence in Germany for the chilling 2019 slaying of Chechen insurgent leader Zelimkhan Khangoshvili. Krasikov carried out the assassination in broad daylight in a busy playground in Berlin in front of children and their parents.
No official confirmation of the deal has yet been made by the White House or the Kremlin.
Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency confirmed in a statement on Thursday that it was coordinating an “exchange operation” that it described as “the most comprehensive of the recent period,” according to Reuters.
The release of Gershkovich comes the month after he was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum-security penal colony after being convicted on espionage charges.
He was arrested by Russia’s FSB security service in March 2023 during a reporting trip to the eastern city of Yekaterinburg and accused of gathering secret information about a Russian tank factory on behalf of the CIA. The Journal and the Biden Administration vehemently denied the allegations, accusing Russia of conducting a sham trial.
Whelan, meanwhile, was detained in Moscow in 2018 and similarly sentenced in 2020 to 16 years’ imprisonment after his conviction on contested espionage charges. He figured in the last U.S. prisoner swap with Russia, in December 2022, in which WNBA star Brittney Griner was exchanged for the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
At the time, U.S. officials said Russia would not consider including Whelan in the deal. President Joe Biden said Moscow was treating his case differently from Griner’s “for totally illegitimate reasons”—but nevertheless vowed to “never give up” on bringing Whelan home.
Research contact: @thedailybeast
