In the largest prisoner exchange since the height of the Cold War, officials of the United States, Russia, Germany and other countries met on an airfield in Ankara, Turkey, on Thursday and swapped at least 24 people — capping months of painstaking diplomacy involving negotiations at the highest levels of nine governments.
Those released included a Russian assassin convicted of murder in Berlin; the American journalist Evan Gershkovich, who was accused of espionage without any known evidence; and several Russian dissidents whose only misdeed was demanding freedom and democracy or criticizing the war in Ukraine, including Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Washington Post Opinions contributor.
White House officials called it the largest and most complicated international prisoner exchange in decades, and one of the biggest diplomatic accomplishments of Joe Biden’s presidency coming less than two weeks after he dropped his reelection bid under pressure over anxieties about his age and fitness for a new term. But the deal was also fraught, raising questions about the West’s willingness to deal with authoritarian regimes that imprison innocent people for negotiating leverage.
In Ankara, Russia released 16 prisoners, many unjustly accused or handed heavy sentences for minor offenses, including Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal; Kara-Murza, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for treason after criticizing the invasion of Ukraine; and Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine that Moscow insisted, despite years of denials, had been spying in Russia.
Russia also freed three Russian citizens who were allies of Alexei Navalny, the political opposition leader who died suddenly in a remote Arctic prison in February as U.S. and German officials were working on an earlier version of the exchange deal that they hoped would include his release.
In exchange, Russia on Thursday received eight prisoners, including the convicted assassin, Vadim Krasikov, an intelligence operative on whom Russian President Vladimir Putin had been singularly fixated and who was convicted of shooting a former Chechen rebel commander, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, to death in broad daylight in a Berlin park. The United States also freed three Russians convicted in U.S. courts of wire fraud and cybercrimes and a suspected Russian intelligence operative accused of procuring American-made electronics for use in the war in Ukraine. Other countries released Russians who had been convicted of spying.
Biden, flanked by the families at the White House, expressed joy that the prisoners were free and celebrated the work with allies that made their release possible, calling the deal “a feat of diplomacy and friendship.” The president said he and the families were able to speak with the released Americans just moments before he addressed the nation from the State Dining Room.
“Their brutal ordeal is over and they’re free,” said Biden, who has made few public appearances since exiting the presidential race on July 21. “This is an incredible relief for all the family members gathered here. It’s a relief to the friends and colleagues all across the country who’ve been praying for this day for a long time.”
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the prisoner swap was one of the largest and most complex in modern times, underscoring the difficulty of negotiations given relations with Russia are badly deteriorated over the war in Ukraine. But White House officials stressed that the deal did not mark a breakthrough in relations with Russia.
“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 U.S. partners and allies working together,” Sullivan told reporters at a briefing Thursday. “It’s the culmination of many rounds of complex, painstaking negotiations over many, many months.”
He added, “In the context of the war against Ukraine and the overall degradation of our relations with Russia, securing the release of Americans detained in Russia has been uniquely challenging.”
In the end, the deal hinged largely on one man: Krasikov, who was found guilty of murder three years ago.
Biden alluded to the complexity of working with Germany to secure the release of Krasikov in his remarks on Thursday.
“The demands … required me to get some significant concessions from Germany, which they originally concluded they could not do because of the person in question,” the president said, referring to Krasikov. “But everybody stepped up. … And it matters — to have relationships really does matter to do these things.”
For months, U.S. and German officials talked through what it would take to release him, overcoming political opposition in Germany and risking the moral hazard of encouraging Russia to seize even more prisoners, knowing that the West would even trade a convicted murderer to bring their citizens home, according to U.S. and German officials involved in the negotiations.
Biden held several phone calls and in-person meetings with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to try to secure the deal, including a rushed meeting Feb. 9 at the White House.
Germany had been prepared to make the trade for Navalny, who recovered at a hospital in Berlin after he was poisoned in Russia with a banned nerve agent in 2020, but the opposition leader’s sudden death in February sent the parties back to the drawing board. Navalny’s wife and associates accused Putin of having him killed to prevent his release once Germany had signaled a deal for Krasikov was possible. The Kremlin has denied any role in Navalny’s death.
In the following weeks, Sullivan, the national security adviser, tasked those who had been hammering out the deal to come up with a list of political prisoners in Russia, including democracy activists and some of Navalny’s close associates, for whom Germany might consider a new trade, said a senior Biden administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive conversations.
Sullivan said the deal hinged on Germany’s willingness to free the convicted assassin.
“It became clear that the Russians would not agree to the release of these individuals without an exchange that included Vadim Krasikov, a Russian criminal who was in German custody and not someone we could offer ourselves,” Sullivan said. “That required extensive diplomatic engagement with our German counterparts, starting at the top with the president himself.”
Most of Navalny’s closest associates had long ago fled Russia and his network had shut down, but the heads of three of his former regional offices imprisoned on extremism charges were released in Thursday’s exchange: Lilia Chanysheva, 42, who ran the office in Bashkortostan; Vadim Ostanin, 47, the head of the office in Barnaul; and Ksenia Fadeyeva, 32, who led the office in Tomsk. Fadeyeva was with Navalny in August 2020, helping him make a political film hours before he was poisoned with the nerve agent at his Tomsk hotel.
Chanysheva had been sentenced to 7½ years, but in April her term was extended by two years, and Fadeyeva was sentenced to 9½ years. Also included in the deal was Ilya Yashin, a longtime political opposition leader and friend of Navalny’s since their earliest days in politics as fellow members of Yabloko, a liberal political party, in the early 2000s.
The earlier planned swap of Krasikov and Navalny had also included Whelan and Gershkovich. They were finally freed in Thursday’s deal, along with Kara-Murza and Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian American journalist for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), the editorially independent, U.S.-financed media organization.
In turn for releasing the journalists and political activists, Russia received people convicted of serious crimes, including Vadim Konoshchenok, who was charged by the Justice Department with smuggling U.S. technology for the Russian military; Roman Seleznev, who was convicted of orchestrating a cyberattack on thousands of U.S. businesses; and Vladislav Klyushin, a businessman with links to the Kremlin who was sentenced to nine years in a U.S. prison for taking part in a $93 million insider trading scheme that involved hacking corporate networks.
While Thursday’s exchange was unusually complex, the Biden administration has had notable success — and drawn sharp criticism — with previous deals.
In September 2023, Iran traded five imprisoned Americans for five Iranians jailed on charges of crimes in the United States and the release of $6 billion in frozen oil funds held in South Korea — a deal denounced by Republicans as overly favorable to Tehran.
In December 2022, Biden agreed to free convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, nicknamed “the Merchant of Death,” who was serving a 25-year sentence in U.S. federal prison, for the American WNBA star Brittney Griner, who was sentenced to 9½ years in Russia for possessing vape cartridges containing less than one gram of cannabis oil. Marijuana even for medical purposes is banned in Russia.
Critics said the White House had prioritized the basketball player over Whelan and others because of her celebrity, and also noted the extreme imbalance in the severity of crimes for which she and Bout had been convicted.
The deal was controversial even within the Biden administration. Releasing a convicted trafficker whose weapons fueled numerous conflicts across the Global South and who supported violent regimes and militant groups in exchange for someone who committed a minor offense was criticized by some officials as disproportionate.
The Griner exchange was especially painful because U.S. officials failed to secure the release of Whelan, who had been left behind in several exchanges already. Whelan, Griner and Gershkovich were all designated by the State Department as “wrongfully detained,” meaning the government committed extra resources to secure their release.
Over the next year and a half, Russia arrested a number of Americans, with many tried in closed trials on charges that have not been supported by any evidence.
In Germany, the negotiations that led to Thursday’s exchange were initially met with internal resistance, with some officials worried that Russia — and other regimes hostile to the West — would view the exchange as precedent-setting and incentive to arrest more innocent people, including Germans, in a bid to free violent criminals.
“For us this was of course a very complicated maneuver,” a high-ranking German official involved in the negotiations said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “What do you do when this becomes a business model?”
Meeting Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, and members of Gershkovich’s family helped sway German officials. Securing the release of former Navalny associates and five German or dual nationals held by Russia and its close ally Belarus were also key to getting Berlin back on board.
Germany’s side of the deal involved bringing home Kevin Lik, 19, who was jailed for treason; Patrick Schoebel, arrested for traveling with marijuana; and Dieter Voronin, who was implicated in a complicated espionage case against Russian journalist Ivan Safronov that has been denounced by Kremlin critics as fabricated. Also freed were German Moyzhes, a German Russian lawyer accused of treason; and Rico Krieger, who was convicted of terrorism in Belarus and sentenced to death but pardoned unexpectedly this week by President Alexander Lukashenko.
Before Thursday’s swap, there were nearly a dozen U.S. citizens and dual nationals held in Russian prisons. And once again, not all Americans are coming home.
Russia was unwilling to release Marc Fogel, an American schoolteacher who was arrested nearly three years ago by Russian authorities for entering the country with medical marijuana, the senior administration official said, stressing that the United States was still working to secure his release. The White House notified Fogel’s family that he would not be part of the deal on Thursday morning, the official said.
Also still imprisoned in Russia are Gordon Black, an active-duty U.S. staff sergeant previously based in South Korea; and Ksenia Karelina, a beautician from California who is a dual citizen.
Black was arrested on May 2 in Vladivostok, where he had followed his Russian girlfriend, violating a U.S. military prohibition on travel to Russia. He was convicted of stealing about $100 from her and sentenced to three years and nine months.
Karelina was arrested in February when she arrived in Russia to visit family. According to Russian media, Karelina was questioned at the airport by border guards, who found in her phone a record of her transferring $51.80 to a charity fund that buys medical equipment for first responders in Ukraine. She has been charged with treason, punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
Sullivan called the families of Gershkovich, Whelan, Kurmasheva and Kara-Murza over the past two days to inform them that the deal was underway and to invite them to the White House.
Putin, in a February interview with former Fox News television host Tucker Carlson, hinted that he would be willing to exchange Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal, who was arrested in March 2023 and accused of espionage, for Krasikov, whom he described as acting out of “patriotic” duty.
The first concrete signs that a deal was once again in the works, however, came last month when a hearing in Gershkovich’s closed trial in the city of Yekaterinburg was suddenly moved forward by a month. Within two days, he was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in prison for espionage — an extraordinarily rushed process for a spying case in Russia. Gershkovich, his employer and the State Department have vehemently denied the Russian charges against him.
On the same day, Kurmasheva was also convicted of spreading false information about the Russian military and sentenced to 6½ years.
Then earlier this week, prisoners in Russia accused of political crimes suddenly started disappearing from the penal colonies where they were being held, with lawyers and relatives unable to contact them and no information about their whereabouts.
Plane spotters noted that special government jets, part of the “Rossia” flight squadron operated by the presidential administration, had been traversing between Moscow and several regions where prisoners were held.
The willingness of the White House to broker deals with Russia, despite the war in Ukraine and a deeply deteriorated relationship between the two powers, is certain to come under further scrutiny.
Some exchanges have been relatively straightforward. In April 2022, Trevor Reed, a U.S. citizen and former Marine who had been detained in Russia since 2019, returned home. In exchange, Russia got Konstantin Yaroshenko — a Russian pilot convicted of cocaine smuggling on a large scale.
But in other cases, Putin has shown that exchanges do not stop him from seeking revenge on those released. In 2010, Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer convicted of spying for Britain, was released in a prisoner exchange that included Russian operatives known as “the illegals” who had been living under false identities in the United States.
In 2018, Russian operatives went to England, where Skripal was living, and tried to kill him using the same class of nerve agent used to poison Navalny in Tomsk two years later.
Gershkovich was the first U.S. journalist arrested in Russia since the Cold War. Despite being accredited as a journalist by Russia’s foreign ministry, he was accused of spying on a military factory in the Sverdlosk region on orders of the CIA. No evidence against him was made public.
Kurmasheva, the RFE/RL journalist, who holds U.S. and Russian passports, was detained in June 2023 after a trip home to Russia to visit her ailing mother. She was convicted under Russia’s wartime fake-news law, which bans the broadcasting or posting of any information about the war in Ukraine other than official propaganda.
In 2023, a court sentenced Kara-Murza, a longtime opposition politician and Post Opinions contributor who this year was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, to 25 years in prison for treason, charges based on his criticism of Russia’s war against Ukraine. It was the harshest penalty yet for an opponent of the war, which Kara-Murza condemned as “unfounded, illegal and politically motivated.”
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