Putin Frees Gershkovich and Other Americans in Exchange for Russian Hitman

Russia freed American Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and others on Thursday in the biggest prisoner swap deal between the U.S. and Moscow since the end of the Cold War, with a Russian assassin heading back to his homeland as part of the arrangement.

A total of 26 people and seven countries were involved in the exchange, which took place in Ankara, Turkey, the Turkish presidency said. It also confirmed that Vadim Krasikov—an FSB hitman jailed in Germany for a shocking daylight murder—was included in the exchange.

As well as Gershkovich, fellow American and former U.S. marine Paul Whelan was confirmed as being part of the deal. Russian-American radio reporter Alsu Kurmasheva was also 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 the U.S. 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.

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan choked back tears during a White House briefing Thursday as he shared details of the operation that secured the release of the hostages. Sullivan said no sanctions were loosened as part of the deal and that there was “no direct engagement with Vladimir Putin” to secure the hostages’ release, but said there were extensive talks with other Russian officials.

Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency (MIT) confirmed in a statement Thursday that it was coordinating an “exchange operation” that it described as “the most comprehensive of the recent period,” according to Reuters .

“We are overwhelmed with relief and elated for Evan and his family, as well as for the others who were released,” Dow Jones CEO Almar Latour and Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker said in a statement. “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. Unfortunately, many journalists remain unjustly imprisoned in Russia and around the world.”

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.

Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist involved in the negotiations for the new swap deal, told The Daily Beast on Wednesday the arrangement is “bittersweet.” On the one hand, he said, the deal freed people “who were rotting away in Russian prisons on insane charges,” while simultaneously rewarding Putin’s belief that “as long as he hoards ‘swap capital’ he will always be able to get his killers, hackers, and spies back.”

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporter Lara Seligman that Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, who died of unknown circumstances in a Russian prison in February, would have been a part of the swap if he had not died.

Read more at The Daily Beast.