Who was released from Russian prisons in historic swap?

Editor’s Note: This is a developing story, with the final list of those released being clarified.

Russia and several Western countries are holding a historic prisoner exchange on Aug. 1, the largest such move in almost 15 years. It is also the most significant prisoner exchange between Russia and the West since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Russian activists, journalists, and dual citizens are among those who have been freed, as well as Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and ex-U.S. Marine Paul Whelan.

The last swap of this kind was in December 2022, when U.S. basketball player Brittney Griner was exchanged for convicted Russian arms deal Viktor Bout.

Griner, who played in the Russian Premier League in the offseason from the WNBA, was arrested in February 2022 in Moscow on drug-related charges, just days before the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She was later sentenced to nine years in prison before finally being exchanged.

The latest swap is larger in scale, freeing some who have languished in Russian prison for years. Here’s what you need to know about some of the individuals involved.

Vladimir Kara-Murza

Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Washington Post contributing columnist, who has condemned Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine and lobbied for Western sanctions against Moscow, was sentenced to 25 years in prison in April 2023 on charges of treason and spreading “false information.” The charges were widely denounced as being politically motivated.

Kara-Murza is a dual U.K.-Russian citizen and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2024 for his writings from prison.

A former colleague of the late opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in 2015 near the Kremlin, Kara-Murza is perhaps the highest-profile surviving Russian opposition figure following the death of Alexei Navalny earlier in 2024.

Kara-Murza’s health has deteriorated in prison.

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Oleg Orlov

Oleg Orlov, a 70-year-old civil activist and historian, has been a co-chair of the Memorial human rights group for more than two decades. He was labeled a “foreign agent” in February and sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “discrediting the military” later that month.

Memorial was founded in the waning days of the Soviet Union, amid the political opening offered under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, to investigate the crimes committed by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his brutal regime. The organization later expanded the scope of its activities to crimes committed by the Soviet government throughout its 70-year tenure. Memorial also advocated for human rights in modern-day Russia.

The group’s human rights wing was declared a “foreign agent” in 2014, and the label was extended to the organization as a whole by 2016.

A Russian court ordered the group’s dissolution in December 2021, a process finalized in April 2022 amid a sweeping crackdown against civil society and domestic opposition. The group continues to operate abroad. It was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.

Evan Gershkovich

Gershkovich, a 32-year-old journalist working for the Wall Street Journal, was arrested in Yekaterinburg in late March 2023 while working on a story about the Wagner mercenary group’s recruiting methods, as well as Russian citizens’ views on the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He was held in pre-trial detention for more than a year.

In June, the Russian Prosecutor General’s office accused Gershkovich of “gathering secret information” on orders from the CIA about a military equipment plant located 150 kilometers (90 miles) north of Yekaterinburg. Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal, and the U.S. government deny that he was a spy and have reiterated that the charges are politically motivated.

Gershkovich was sentenced in July to 16 years in a maximum security penal colony. He pleaded not guilty.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed on July 17 that there was “irrefutable evidence” that Gershkovich is guilty and asserted that the U.S. and U.K. have a long history of recruiting journalists as spies.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump claimed in May that Gershkovich “will be released almost immediately after the election (to be held in November 2024).”

“Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, will do that for me, but not for anyone else, and WE WILL BE PAYING NOTHING,” he wrote on the TruthSocial network.

Trump repeated the claim in July, asserting that President Joe Biden will “NEVER GET HIM OUT, unless he pays a “king’s ransom.”

Ilya Yashin

Ilya Yashin is a Russian opposition leader who formerly served on the Moscow City Council from 2017-2021. Along with the late Boris Nemtsov and other opposition leaders, Yashin protested against the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and publicly denounced the full-scale invasion in 2022.

In June 2022, Yashin was arrested for “disobeying a police officer” and was subsequently accused of “discrediting” the Russian military in July. The charges stemmed from a YouTube video that Yashin made earlier that year talking about the Russian Bucha Massacre, in which Russian soldiers murdered hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in a Kyiv suburb in the early weeks of the full-scale war.

Yashin was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison in December 2022 for “spreading false information” about the military. His appeal was rejected in April of the following year.

Paul Whelan

Paul Whelan, a veteran of the U.S. Marines, was detained in Moscow in December 2018 and later sentenced to 16 years in prison on espionage charges, which both he and the U.S. government deny. Whelan maintains he was visiting Russia to attend a friend’s wedding.

In addition to U.S. citizenship, Whelan is also a citizen of the U.K., Ireland, and Canada.

Whelan was accused of obtaining a USB drive with the names of intelligence officials while in Russia.

A Russophile who regularly visited Russia, Whelan had numerous associates in the Russian Navy and Defense Ministry.

At the time of his arrest, former CIA officials told the New York Times (NYT) that Whelan’s military record (he was court-martialed by the Marines in 2008 for larceny and check fraud) likely would have made his recruitment by the intelligence agency difficult. Former CIA officers also said that officers are rarely sent to Russia without a diplomatic passport, which Whelan did not have.

Despite the multiple passports, Whelan’s twin brother chalked it up to “genealogical interest,” rather than a sign of a possible spy.

Kevin Lik

Lik, a dual Russian-German citizen, was sentenced to four years in prison earlier in 2024 for allegedly taking photos of a military site near the city of Maykop in Russia’s north Caucasus region of Adygea. Lik is 18, reportedly the youngest person ever convicted of treason in Russia.

Lik allegedly took the photos when he was 16 and emailed them to “representatives of a foreign state,” according to Russian authorities. He was held in pre-trial detention for 10 months before being charged and convicted after he turned 18.

Born in Germany to Russian-German father and a Russian mother, Lik moved to Maykop with his mother in 2017, knowing almost no Russian at the time.

Alsu Kurmasheva

Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s (RFE/RL) Tatar-Bashkir service, was arrested in May 2023 and subsequently charged with “spreading false information” after spending almost a year in pretrial detention. She was sentenced to six and a half years in prison in July.

According to RFE/RL, Kurmasheva, who holds both U.S. and Russian citizenship, lived in Prague with her family and traveled to Russia in May 2023 for a family emergency. When she tried to leave Russia the following month, authorities confiscated both her Russian and American passports, supposedly on the premise that she had not registered her U.S. passport.

Kurmasheva has been unable to leave Russia since then. RFE/RL confirmed that she had been charged with the so-called foreign agent violation in October while waiting for the return of her passports.

RFE/RL reported that Kurmasheva’s charges relate to a book she helped distribute about Russians who are opposed to the full-scale war in Ukraine.

Kurmasheva’s arrest and extended pre-trial detention fits a pattern seen with many of the foreign prisoners and dissidents held in Russia.

Her arrest was widely condemned by RFE/RL, the EU, a number of Western countries, and a wide variety of NGOs, including the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Amnesty International, and others.