US and Russia have carried out the biggest prisoner swap since the Cold War: Here’s who was involved
Moscow and Washington have exchanged a total of 26 prisoners that had been held in several countries, in the biggest such swap in modern history. The exchange took place on Thursday afternoon in Türkiye.
Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich and Russian intelligence operative Vadim Krasikov were the two most prominent names on the swap list. Russia retrieved ten of its nationals in exchange for 16 people sent to the West – 12 to Germany and four to the US.
“I want to thank you all for staying faithful to your oaths, your duty, and your country that has not forgotten you,” President Vladimir Putin said in Moscow, meeting the returning Russians at the airport personally.
US President Joe Biden confirmed the release of "three American citizens and one American green-card holder who were unjustly imprisoned in Russia,” describing the exchange as “a feat of diplomacy” and thanking Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway and Türkiye for helping achieve it.
The last major prisoner swap took place in December 2022, with the US releasing Russian businessman Viktor Bout for Brittney Griner, a basketball player convicted on drug charges in Moscow.
Thursday’s exchange was bigger in volume than ‘Operation Ghost Stories,’ the 2010 swap of US and Russian “sleeper agents.” It was dwarfed only by the 1985 exchange of 25 Americans held in East Germany and Poland for one Polish and three Soviet spies.
Who was sent to the West
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was convicted of espionage in early July and sentenced to 16 years in a maximum-security colony. The 32-year-old was caught “red handed” in March last year soliciting classified information about Uralvagonzavod, a major Russian tank and armored vehicle manufacturer in Ekaterinburg.
Former US Marine Paul Whelan was detained in December 2018 at Moscow’s Metropol Hotel in a FSB sting operation. He was sentenced in 2020 to 16 years in a maximum-security colony in Mordovia. The 54-year-old US-British-Irish-Canadian citizen recently urged Washington to “fill up Guantanamo Bay with Russian officials, arrest Russian spies” in order to secure his release.
Rico Krieger, a German citizen and the first Westerner to be sentenced to death in Belarus, was pardoned by President Alexander Lukashenko on Tuesday. The 29-year-old was found guilty by a court in Minsk in early July on six criminal counts, including “mercenary activity” and an “act of terrorism,” for detonating an explosive charge on a rail line on behalf of Ukrainian intelligence.
Vladimir Kara-Murza is a dual citizen of Russia and the UK. He was sentenced in 2023 to 25 years in a maximum-security colony for treason, among other charges. Kara-Murza had accused Russian troops of committing war crimes in Ukraine and served as vice-chairman of the Washington-based Free Russia Foundation – a US-funded pressure group which has pushed for “regime change” in Moscow. He was a protege of the late opposition politician Boris Nemtsov and a close associate of exiled former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Ilya Yashin, former Moscow councilman, was designated a foreign agent and sentenced to 8.5 years in 2022, for spreading false information about the Russian military.
Kevin Leak, is the youngest person ever to be convicted of treason in Russia. The 19-year-old German-Russian dual citizen was sentenced to four years in prison last December. On Tuesday, his mother told the media that her food package could not be delivered because there was “no such inmate” at the colony in Arkhangelsk.
Ksenia Fadeyeva and Lilia Chanysheva are former employees of the late opposition activist Alexey Navalny’s nonprofits. Fadeyeva was sentenced to nine years in prison for extremism by a Tomsk court. Her lawyers argued that Fadeyeva ended her involvement with Navalny’s organization before it was labeled extremist in 2021. Chanysheva was found guilty of creating an extremist community, inciting extremism, and establishing an organization that violated citizens’ rights, by a court in Bashkortostan in June 2023. An appeals court increased her prison term to ten years in April this year, deeming the original sentence too lenient.
Vadim Ostanin, former head of the Barnaul branch of Navalny’s FBK foundation, was arrested in December 2021 and charged with running an extremist organization. He was sentenced to nine years in prison in July last year.
Aleksandra ‘Sasha’ Skochilenko, an artist from St. Petersburg, was convicted in November 2023 for spreading false information about the Russian army. She worked with a feminist collective to replace price tags at a supermarket with messages accusing Russia of being a “fascist state” and of bombing civilians in Ukraine.
Oleg Orlov, 70, headed the human rights NGO Memorial. He wrote an article in 2022 denouncing the conflict in Ukraine and accusing Russia of descending into “fascism.” He was sentenced to 30 months in prison in February 2024. [source]
Andrey Pivovarov ran the now-banned Open Russia movement until he was detained in May 2021. He was sentenced to four years in prison in July 2022.
Alsu Kurmasheva was arrested in Kazan in October 2023 and charged with failing to register as a foreign agent. The charges were later expanded to “spreading false information” about the Russian military. The 47-year-old Russian-American worked for the Tatar-Bashkir language service of the US state-funded outlet RFE/RL.
German Moyzhes, a dual Russian-German citizen, has been a prominent cycling activist in St. Petersburg and ran a company that provided services to Russians seeking to emigrate to Germany. He was arrested in May and charged with treason.
Dieter ‘Demuri’ Voronin was arrested in 2021, on suspicion of paying Roscosmos employee Ivan Safronov for classified information about the Russian military in Syria, on behalf of the German intelligence agency BND. He is a dual citizen of Germany and Russia and used a Georgian name on his Russian passport.
Patrick Schoebel, 38, is a German national who was detained in St. Petersburg in February, after edible marijuana snacks were found in his luggage. He was charged with drug trafficking.
Who are the released Russians
Vadim Krasikov is an alleged FSB operative who had been imprisoned in Germany since 2020.
A Berlin court sentenced Krasikov last year to life in prison for killing Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen separatist with Georgian citizenship, in a Berlin park in 2019. Some of the evidence against Krasikov was provided by the German magazine Der Spiegel, the US-government funded website Bellingcat, and the Russian opposition outlet The Insider.
Artem Dultsev and his wife Anna, arrested in 2022 in Slovenia. They were alleged to be “sleeper” agents, posing as an Argentinian couple that ran an art gallery and an IT business in Ljubljana as cover for their intelligence activities around the EU. Two of their underage children were also included in the exchange.
Maxim Marchenko pleaded guilty to federal charges of money laundering and smuggling in February, for allegedly transporting “US-manufactured military-grade microelectronics to end users in Russia, illegally delivering controlled technologies worth hundreds of thousands of dollars,” according to US prosecutors. He was sentenced on July 17 to three years in prison.
Vadim Konoshchenok was arrested by the authorities in Tallinn on a US warrant in July 2023. The 48-year-old resident of Estonia was accused of “having ties to the FSB” and smuggling “hundreds of thousands of illicit munitions” to “Moscow’s war machine,” in violation of the US and EU embargo on Russia.
Vladislav Klyushin was arrested in Switzerland in March 2021 and extradited to the US in December that year. A Boston court sentenced the 42-year-old businessman in July 2023 to nine years in prison, on charges of “securities fraud, wire fraud, gaining unauthorized access to computers, and conspiracy to commit those crimes.” He was allegedly involved in “an elaborate hack-to-trade scheme that netted approximately $93 million through securities trades based on confidential corporate information stolen from US computer networks.”
Alleged hacker Roman Seleznev has been handed several lengthy prison sentences in the US on a variety of computer crime charges, reportedly resulting in $9 million in bank fraud damages and $50 million worth of online identity theft, most recently in 2017.
Mikhail Mikushin was arrested in 2022 on suspicion of spying for Russia. The 46-year-old academic was teaching at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromso, using a Brazilian passport in the name of Jose Assis Giammaria.
Pavel Rubtsov, also known as Pablo Gonzalez, was arrested on February 28, 2022 in Poland on suspicion of espionage. The dual Russian-Spanish citizen has worked for a variety of Spanish media as a freelancer since 2014, often covering the Donbass conflict.
