President Joe Biden deserves credit for the prisoner swap agreement that led to Russia releasing Americans Evan Gershkovich, Alsu Kurmasheva, Paul Whelan, and other Germans and Russians on Thursday. While this deal carries a heavy risk of boosting Russian President Vladimir Putin's appetite for aggressive intelligence operations, it deserves support.
Biden and his key negotiator, CIA Director Bill Burns — I'll write more on Burns in my next piece — deserve particular credit in terms of the parameters of the agreement. After all, Biden likely could have reached a deal earlier if it only involved Americans and some Germans detained by Russia. Instead, the deal included a significant number of German citizens, possibly including some German BND foreign intelligence service agents and officers, and prominent Russian dissidents. It would have been challenging to persuade the Kremlin to release political opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza, for example. That bears noting amid prior claims by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump that he could have made a prisoner swap deal without significant U.S. concessions.
Yet we shouldn't forget, as some in the media are forgetting , that Gershkovich was detained under Biden, not Trump.
Gershkovich was detained under Biden because the president had shown Putin that he would make significant concessions even in the face of blatantly unjust Russian detentions. Putin learned this lesson in December 2022 when Biden exchanged a major Russian arms dealer, Viktor Bout, for the WNBA star Brittney Griner. As I warned shortly before that swap, "This arrangement would only encourage Russia to conduct more extensive hostage-taking of Americans in the future. It would also play to Vladimir Putin’s perspective of the United States as a weak adversary that can be coerced into policy via emotional rather than hard-headed policy considerations. That is a very dangerous gambit to adopt with the former KGB officer."
Gershkovich was detained three months later on March 29, 2023.
Again, Biden deserves credit for getting Gershkovich and the other prisoners home. But history matters. And amid the celebration over what has just happened, there's still a lesson to learn.
Namely, that it's very dangerous to broadcast weakness to Putin. The way to deal with Griner's detention was not to release Bout but rather to steadily increase pressure on Russia in diplomatic, economic fora until Putin decided the costs of her detention outweighed the benefits. This would have obviously been unpleasant for Griner, likely leading to her detention for a far longer period, but it would also have underlined something the truth that national interests and individual interests do not always comport. And it would have made Gershkovich's latter detention less likely.
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As Putin now escalates his sabotage and assassination plots in the West , and as he threatens ever more dastardly consequences for Western support for Ukraine, the U.S. should recognize Putin for what he is: a leader who is bold and opportunistic, but also one who makes decisions based on how his opponents have previously responded to his pressure tactics.
The next time an American is taken hostage or U.S. interests are otherwise attacked by Russia, the first U.S. response should not be to enter a long process of negotiations. Instead, the U.S. should escalate in riposte.
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