‘Something That’s Out of a Movie’: CNN Predicts ‘Very Dramatic’ Images Will Soon Emerge from Prisoner Swap With Russia

Following the breaking news on Thursday that imprisoned Americans Paul Whelan and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich would be released, CNN’s Alex Marquardt provided a “dramatic” description of what the scene could look like, based on past prisoner releases.

Senior officials with President Joe Biden’s administration confirmed on Thursday that Whelan and Gershkovich were part of a multi-country prisoner swap with Russia, and their release was underway. While no images were available at the time of their report, Marquardt had some information about where both men were headed once they were back in U.S. custody:

[O]n top of the history and emotion that we will see today, it’s also going to be very dramatic. If past is precedent, this is going to be something that’s out of a movie. We have seen, on video, the releases of Trevor Reed , of Brittney Griner , of Viktor Boot from the U.S. to the Russians. So we’re going to start to see in the coming hours, photos and videos released by different governments, released by different agencies. What we expect to happen — and again, this is, we don’t have the details of how this is going to unfold — but how it’s happened in the past, is that, planes from these different countries carrying these prisoners, converge on a tarmac in a third country. In the past, with Brittney Griner , for example, it took place in the United Arab Emirates. There were prisoners released from Iran who were transferred in Doha, the capital of Qatar. Turkey, it has also been playing a role in this, so we could see prisoners being exchanged in the capital at the airport there in Ankara. So this is one of the details that we’re trying to find out.

Watch the video above via CNN.