Russia has released an American journalist, Evan Gershkovich, and a former US Marine, Paul Whelan, as part of a prisoner exchange deal involving multiple countries, under which 26 prisoners were freed on Thursday.
The prisoner deal, the largest swap in post-Soviet history between Russia and the United States, took place in the Turkish capital Ankara, according to Turkish officials who spoke to the news agency Reuters.
Besides the US and Russia, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway, and Belarus were also part of the swap deal. According to Turkish officials, 10 prisoners, including two minors, were moved to Russia, 13 to Germany, and three to the United States.
Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter in Russia, was arrested in March 2023 on espionage charges, which he and the US government vehemently denied. He was subsequently sentenced to 16 years in a high-security Russian prison.
The Wall Street Journal had said in a statement that he was facing “a false and baseless charge” based on what it called “calculated and transparent lies”. President Joe Biden had called Gershkovich’s detention “totally illegal”.
Whelan, a former Marine who was working as a corporate security executive from Michigan, was detained in Moscow in 2018 and convicted on espionage charges. He has been serving a 16-year sentence in a Russian prison. Whelan and the US government have denied that he is a spy, and Washington has designated him as “wrongfully detained”.
Others in Thursday’s swap included Vadim Krasikov, a colonel in the Russian FSB security service, who was serving a life sentence in Germany for murdering an exiled Chechen-Georgian dissident in a Berlin park. President Vladimir Putin had previously expressed a desire to have him returned to Russia.
Rico Krieger, a German who had been sentenced to death in Belarus on terrorism charges, was pardoned on Tuesday by President Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Putin. Krieger was also among those released, along with Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin, according to Turkey.
Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency (MIT) said in a statement, “Our organisation has undertaken a major mediation role in this exchange operation, which is the most comprehensive of the recent period”. However, the White House and Kremlin declined to comment on the development.
Data from flight tracking sites showed that a special Russian government plane, previously used for a prisoner swap involving the United States and Russia, travelled from Moscow to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which borders Poland and Lithuania, before returning to the Russian capital. Additionally, a Russian government plane was spotted on the ground in the Turkish capital, Ankara, Reuters reported.
