BERLIN (Reuters) - The German government played a key role in Thursday's prisoner swap between Moscow and the West with its release of Vadim Krasikov, a Russian convicted of the 2019 murder of a former Chechen militant in Berlin, a decision it said it did not take lightly.

Krasikov was among the Russians released by the West in exchange for 15 people imprisoned "unjustly" in Russia and a German who had been sentenced to death in Belarus, the German government said in a statement.

Russia had approached the United States as early as 2022 with offers to free U.S. prisoners as part of a deal for Krasikov, serving a life sentence in Germany.

But given Krasikov was not the Americans' to give, U.S. officials did not consider the offer was serious.

Moreover such a swap was politically complicated for Germany given the brazenness of the murder, committed in broad daylight a few minutes' walk from parliament and the office of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel.

It was not until January this year that U.S. President Joe Biden took the issue directly to his counterpart and leftist ally German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He told Biden, "For you I will do this," Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Thursday.

"It was not easy for anyone to make this decision to deport a murderer sentenced to life imprisonment after only a few years in prison," said Scholz, who interrupted his summer vacation to greet some of the released prisoners upon their arrival at Cologne airport.

The state's interest in enforcing the prison sentence had to be weighed against the liberty of innocent people imprisoned in Russia and those unjustly imprisoned for political reasons, he said.

"And that is why it was important to us that we have an obligation to protect German nationals as well as solidarity with the United States," the chancellor added, noting the decision had consolidated the U.S.-German friendship.

Biden acknowledged that Germany had had to make significant concessions to achieve the prisoner swap.

The virtually unprecedented exchange happened "because the United States and Germany had a level of confidence, trust and mutual interest that allowed something difficult in the German justice system to occur and could cause criticism at home," said Jeffrey Rathke, a former U.S. diplomat and president of the American-German Institute at the Johns Hopkins University.

The deal could boost Biden's Democrats ahead of November's presidential election, said Rathke - which in turn is in Berlin's interests given concerns about a possible deterioration of the transatlantic alliance in the event of the re-election of Republican former President Donald Trump.

GERMAN CITIZENS TARGETED?

Scholz said he had spoken extensively with those who arrived in Germany late on Thursday after being released by Russia in what he described as a "very moving" encounter.

"Many did not expect this to happen now and are still very full of the feelings associated with suddenly being able to be free after all," he told reporters. "Many had feared for their health and even their lives."

Those released would in coming days receive health checks and other assistance, he said.

After the detention of several German citizens in Russia in the latter half of 2023 and the start of this year, the Foreign Office sharpened its warnings in March against travelling to Russia, saying Germans were "urgently warned" not to go there.

Among the risks it cited was that of arbitrary imprisonment, and it warned in particular that Russia did not recognise Russian-German dual citizens as Germans, which was the case with three of the five Germans released on Thursday from jail in Russia and Belarus.

In one of the most high profile cases of detentions, Russia ally Belarus had sentenced to death German national Rico Krieger on terrorism charges.

Krieger said last week in an interview with Belarus-1 state TV that Ukraine's SBU security service had told him to photograph military sites in Belarus in October, and to plant explosives on a train line southeast of Minsk. The explosives went off but no one was hurt.

It was not clear whether Krieger was speaking under duress at the time. In a sign of the impending swap, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko pardoned Krieger on Tuesday.

Also included in Thursday's swap was Kevin Lick, a 19-year-old dual Russian-German citizen, who was sentenced in December 2023 to four years in prison for treason.

Lick, the youngest person convicted of treason in the history of the Russian Federation, was detained for allegedly sending photos of a military unit visible from his apartment window to the German security services, according to non-profit organization Rights in Russia which is based in Britain.

Lick denies the charges, his mother said in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine in April.

(Reporting by Kirsti Knolle, Sarah Marsh, Thomas Escritt, Friederike Heine and Riham Alkousaa in Berlin and Andrea Shalal in Washington; Editing by Thomas Seythal, Alex Richardson, Frances Kerry and Daniel Wallis)

Germany plays key role in prisoner swap with Russian assassin release

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