The biggest prisoner swap between Russia and the West since the Cold War took place early Thursday, with a total of 24 people released, the United States has confirmed.
The White House said 16 prisoners have been released and are on their way back to Europe and the United States. Among them is Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.
In return, eight Russian prisoners were released from prisons in the United States, Norway, Germany, Poland and Slovenia, including individuals accused of intelligence activities. The children of two prisoners have also returned. Russia.
The exchange took place on the tarmac at Ankara airport early Thursday morning.
President Joe Biden has confirmed that US Marine Corps veteran Paul Whelan, Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and British-Russian activist Vladimir Kara-Murza – who hold US green cards – are also on their way back to the US.
The deal took more than 18 months to implement and appears to have been contingent on Moscow’s demand for Vadim Krasikov’s release.
He is serving a life sentence in Germany for carrying out an assassination attempt in a Berlin park, and has now returned to Russia.
Senior US administration officials described him as a “bad guy” and said he was “certainly the biggest fish the Russians want to catch.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin and other senior officials, along with an honor guard, welcomed the returning Russians at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport.
Previous prisoner swap talks have included jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, but the offer collapsed when he died in February.
His widow Yulia welcomed the exchange, describing it as a “joy”.
The U.S. government“Every political prisoner released is a huge victory and a reason to celebrate,” she shared in a post on X.
“No one should be held hostage by Putin, tortured or left to die in his prisons.”
The White House view is that the deal is the most complex exchange in US-Russian history.
Mr Biden called it a “diplomatic achievement” and added that many countries had “engaged in difficult, complex negotiations at my request, and I thank them personally”.
He added that those released had been convicted in “sham trials” and sentenced to “long terms of imprisonment without any justification”.
Mr Biden, along with relatives of the three Americans and Kara-Murza, called from the Oval Office after the exchange was completed.
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said he welcomed the release, particularly of Kara-Murza and Whelan, who are British nationals.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin said in a statement that 13 prisoners had been pardoned to ensure the return of Russians held in prisons abroad.
There was no explanation as to why the names of the two released Germans, Patrick Schobel and Herman Moyzhes, were not on the amnesty list.
ReutersGerman citizen Rico Krieger sentenced to death in Belarus before being pardoned of the country’s leader Alexander Lukashenko earlier this week was also announced.
Others involved in the deal include Russian political prisoners Ilya Yashin and Oleg Orlov.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz insisted the exchange was “the right decision and if you had any doubts, you will no longer have any doubts after talking to those who are now free”.
“Many prisoners fear for their health, even their lives,” he added after meeting some of the prisoners as they arrived at Cologne Bonn Airport.
Earlier, the Turkish presidential office said prisoners from both sides of the deal were taken off the plane at Ankara airport, transferred to secure locations under the supervision of Turkish security officials and put on planes to their destination countries.
It says there were 26 individuals involved in the exchange. That number includes two children, A US official confirmed that he had returned to Russia with his parents, Artyom Dultsev and Anna Dultseva – a Russian couple convicted of espionage in Slovenia and part of the exchange.
The exchange comes after days of speculation about a major exchange between several countries, which grew after several dissidents and journalists jailed in Russia were moved from their prison cells to unknown locations.
While secret prisoner transfers are common in Russia, the disappearance of so many high-profile prisoners is unusual.
The most recent high-profile prisoner swap took place in December 2022, when American basketball star Brittney Griner was traded on the tarmac at Abu Dhabi airport for notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who had been held in a US prison for 12 years.
The most recent similar incident occurred in Vienna in 2010, when 10 Russian spies detained in the United States were exchanged for four alleged double agents detained in Russia.
One of them was Sergei Skripal, a former military intelligence officer who was later poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury in 2018.
Tensions between Moscow and the West have been high in recent years, especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
