US journalist Evan Gershkovich, accused of espionage, smiles from inside a glass defendants’ cage prior to a hearing in Yekaterinburg’s Sverdlovsk Regional Court on June 26, 2024.
Natalia Kolesnikova | Afp | Getty Images
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan were released Thursday by Russia as part of a major, multi-nation swap of two dozen prisoners.
The Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and British-Russian activist Vladimir Kara-Murza also were freed as part of the swap, along with five German citizens and seven Russian citizens. All of those people had been in prison in Russia.
Eight Russians, including the spy and convicted hitman Vadim Kraiskov, are being returned to Russia from the United States, Slovenia, Norway, Poland and Germany.
Gershkovich, Whelan and Kurmasheva are U.S. citizens, while Kara-Murza is a permanent American resident.
The release of Kraiskov, who had been held in Germany for murdering a former Chechen militant in Berlin in 2019, was key to getting Russia to agree to the swap, according to a Biden administration official.
“Today’s exchange will be historic,” said White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan during a call with reporters.
“Not since the Cold War has there been a similar number of individuals exchanged in this way and there has never, so far as we know, been an exchange involving so many countries, so many close US partners and allies working together,” Sullivan said.
“It’s the culmination of many rounds of complex, painstaking negotiations over many, many months.”
Gershkovich, who was arrested in Russia in March 2023 on espionage charges, was sentenced in mid-July to 16 years in prison after a trial that the United States government has blasted as a sham.
The journalist was convicted of collecting secret information about the activities of a defense enterprise for the production and repair of military equipment on instructions from U.S. intelligence services.
Whelan has been serving his own 16-year sentence for alleged espionage in Russia after being sentenced in 2020, two years after his arrest in Moscow.
President Joe Biden is meeting Thursday with families of the American prisoners being released, a senior administration official said.
The people being sent to Germany from Russian custody are: Dieter Voronin, Kevin Lick, Rico Krieger, Patrick Schoebel, Herman Moyzhes, Ilya Yashin, Liliya Chanysheva, Kseniya Fadeyeva, Vadim Ostanin, Andrey Pivovarov, Oleg Orlov, Sasha Skochilenko.
The people being sent to Russia, in addition to Kraiskov, are: Artem Viktorovich Dultsev and Anna Valerevna Dultseva, from Slovenia; Mikhail Valeryevich Mikushin, from Norway; Pavel Alekseyevich Rubtsov, from Poland; and Roman Seleznev, Vladislav Klyushin and Vadim Konoshchenock, from the United States.
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