WASHINGTON: The United States and Russia completed their biggest prisoner swap in post-Soviet history on Thursday, with Moscow releasing Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and fellow American Paul Whelan in a multinational deal that set some two dozen people free, according to officials in Türkiye, where the exchange took place.
It’s the latest exchange between Washington and Moscow in the past two years, following a December 2022 trade that brought WNBA star Brittney Griner back to the US in exchange for notorious arms trafficker Viktor Bout.
Russia meanwhile secured the freedom of its own nationals convicted of serious crimes in the West.
The sprawling deal, the latest in a series of prisoner swaps negotiated between Russia and the US in the last two years but the first to require significant concessions from other countries, was heralded by President Joe Biden as a diplomatic achievement in the final months of his administration. But the release of Americans has come at a price: Russia has secured the freedom of its own nationals convicted of serious crimes in the West by trading them for journalists, dissidents and other Westerners convicted and sentenced in a highly politicized legal system on charges the US considers bogus.
The Wall Street Journal confirmed the release, with top editor Emma Tucker saying in a staff email: “I cannot even begin to describe the immense happiness and relief that this news brings and I know all of you will feel the same.”
In February, a Moscow court ruled to keep him in custody pending his trial. In March, the court ordered him to remain in jail on espionage charges until at least late June. The 32-year-old had spent nearly a year behind bars by then. In April, the court rejected an appeal that sought to end his pretrial detention.
His arrest in the city of Yekaterinburg rattled journalists in Russia, where authorities have not detailed what, if any, evidence they have to support the espionage charges.
Since his detention, Gershkovich has appeared more than a dozen times in Russian courtrooms — first in Moscow, where he was held at the notorious Lefortovo Prison, and then at the Sverdlovsk Regional Court in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg.
His pretrial appearances became almost formulaic, as he was led in handcuffs over and over from a prison van to a glass defendant’s cage. They offered his family and friends both a painful reminder of his detention but also a chance to lay eyes on him.
“It’s always a mixed feeling. I’m happy to see him and that he’s doing well, but it’s a reminder that he is not with us. We want him at home,” Gershkovich’s mother, Ella Milman, told The Associated Press in an interview in March.
Although Gershkovich was often seen smiling in the brief appearances, friends and family said he found it hard to face a wall of cameras pointed at him as if he were an animal in a zoo.
As his trial started behind closed doors on June 26, Gershkovich stood in the defendants cage with a shaved head as the media were allowed briefly into the court.
The arrest of Gershkovich — the first US journalist taken into custody on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986 at the height of the Cold War — came as a shock, even though Russia had enacted increasingly repressive laws on freedom of speech after the attack of Ukraine in February 2022. — Agencies
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