The Real Trade-Off With Russia

Last night, the anticipation of a prisoner swap between Russia and the West was nearly unbearable for advocates of prisoners held in Russia. My own sleep was fitful. Among those who might be released were journalists, dissidents, and human-rights workers I knew in Russia, or whose work I’ve covered as a reporter.

The deal is in many ways the fruit of years-long negotiations involving multiple countries, but it really came unstuck last month, says Christo Grozev, a researcher who tracks Russian intelligence operations. And according to advocates, the swap includes a few of Russia’s domestic political prisoners, to be released alongside the foreign hostages. In return for all of them, Russia is expected to recover a contract murderer and a Russian couple caught spying in Europe, among other detainees abroad.

“It’s all very bittersweet,” Grozev told me yesterday: Political prisoners and foreign hostages were to be freed, but President Vladimir Putin will have incentive to continue amassing “swap capital” by taking hostages for future trades.

Today’s swap resonates with past Soviet practices. Back then, high-profile Russian prisoners often wound up in spy swaps despite having no ties to espionage. But if the Soviet regime was leveraging foreign hostages for gain, it was subtler about doing so. In 1969, the Soviet Union and Britain concluded an exchange of spies: An American couple convicted of spying for Russia in Britain was traded for a British schoolteacher named Gerald Brooke, whom the Soviets accused of spying while in the U.S.S.R. As a bonus, Moscow gave three Soviet citizens long-sought exit visas. One of them was Lyudmila Matthews, the mother of my friend and former colleague at Newsweek Owen Matthews.

“My mother came along as a bonus to Brooke, but at least in the U.S.S.R., they tried to create a clean picture,” Matthews told me. He has written a memoir about his family history and the spy swap that allowed his parents to meet and marry. Brooke was never proved to have worked for a foreign government while in the Soviet Union, but, Matthews pointed out, he was arrested for carrying anti-Soviet literature, “while Evan Gershkovich, who is flying home today, was a completely innocent journalist.”

Today the Russian news media reported that Moscow had dispatched two airplanes to Turkey with all of those whom Russia is releasing in the swap. Among them were the 10 Russian political prisoners included as “bonuses.” In return, the Kremlin is bringing home Vadim Krasikov, who had been serving a life sentence in Germany for shooting a Chechen dissident in a Berlin park; a couple arrested in Slovenia for spying; and several spies arrested in the United States while operating without diplomatic cover.

Everyone is happy to see innocent people returned to their families rather than rotting in Russian prisons. But the swap also has some disturbing implications for the hundreds of political prisoners and thousands of Ukrainian civilians who remain locked up in Russia.

“Unfortunately, the West’s swap fund is tiny compared to Russia’s giant trading capital,” Sergei Davidis, who runs the Moscow-based NGO Political Prisoners Support Program, told me. “It’s harder to build it in a just state: Even the two Russian spies caught in Slovenia were sentenced to only a year and a half in prison. Western courts respect the law, state constitutions, and human rights, while we have monitored and counted 774 political cases” in Russia.

Nonetheless, advocates for political prisoners in Russia have labored behind the scenes for a swap. How else might political prisoners and foreign detainees be freed?

Grozev, who worked closely with the late dissident leader Alexei Navalny, says that he had the idea of approaching the German chancellery about including Krasikov in a trade back in 2022. He figured that Krasikov was the only prisoner Russia might want freed more than it wanted Navalny in prison. He knew that “having Germany release a convicted assassin will be very hard, and morally very hard to justify,” he told me. “However, we surmised, maybe the chance of creating a political problem for Putin by having Navalny able to continue his political fight outside jail will justify this moral exception.”

Navalny did not live to see the conclusion of the back-channel negotiations then under way. But the dealmaking did not include only him. Three years ago, Ivan Pavlov, a Russian defense attorney in exile, supplied then–American Ambassador John J. Sullivan with a long list of his clients serving extended sentences supposedly for treason and espionage. That’s when the maneuvering for a trade began, Pavlov said. And some of those prisoners may now be headed for freedom.

The outlook after this exchange, however, is dim, Pavlov told me. “The West does not have as many convicts for swapping.”