Jake Sullivan Reveals Russian Hostage Negotiations Would Have Included Alexei Navalny — If He Were Still Alive

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan confirmed on Thursday that negotiations in the prisoner swap deal that resulted in the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich , Paul Whelan , and several others would have included Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had he lived.

CBS News White House correspondent Nancy Cordes asked Sullivan about the massive deal, which was the biggest deal of its kind since the Cold War , and in her follow-up, she asked if it would have also included Navalny, who died in a Russian prison in February:

Cordes: Was Alexei Navalny supposed to be a part of this deal before he died in prison?

Sullivan: So, we had been working with our partners on a deal that would have included Alexei Navalny. And, unfortunately, he died. In fact, on the very day that he died, I saw Evan’s parents, and I told them that the president was determined to get this done, even in light of that tragic news, and that we were going to work, day and night to get to this day. And so that work continued over the course of the past few months and culminated in today.

At the time, Sullivan called Navalny’s death “a terrible tragedy” and added: “[G]iven the Russian government’s long and sordid history of doing harm to its opponents, it raises real and obvious questions about what happened here.”

Watch the video above via CNN.