Russia has released Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan as part of a major prisoner swap with the United States, people familiar with the situation told Bloomberg.
The men, jailed in Russia on espionage charges that both they and the U.S. deny, are headed to destinations outside Russia. The U.S. and its allies will return prisoners held by them to Russia under the deal, the people, who asked not to be named to discuss matters not yet public, told the outlet.
The Kremlin will also release dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza as part of the deal, a European official said on condition of anonymity. Kara-Murza, 42, an activist with dual Russian and British citizenship, has been a persistent defender of President Vladimir Putin’s regime and was sentenced in April last year to a record 25 years in prison on treason and other charges for criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
No further details about the exchange were available, according to Bloomberg. The United States has been in extensive talks to secure the release of Gershkovich and Whelan, whom the State Department has described as wrongly detained.
Gershkovich, 32, was arrested in March last year while reporting in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg and accused of spying for the CIA. Both he and the newspaper denied the accusations.
Last month he was convicted and sentenced to 16 years, the first time since the Cold War that Russia has tried an American journalist for espionage.
Whelan, arrested in 2018, was sentenced to 16 years in 2020 on espionage charges that he denied.
According to Russian outlet The Insider, Russia has received in exchange FSB intelligence agent Vadim Krasikov, a Russian citizen imprisoned in Germany for killing a former Chechen rebel commander in a brazen assassination in Berlin in 2019. After the incident, Putin had called Krasikov a “patriot” and announced that he was open to exchanging him for Evan Gershkovich.
There was no immediate confirmation from U.S. officials. The Kremlin declined to comment on the exchange.
It would be the first prisoner swap between Russia and the West since American basketball star Brittney Griner was traded for convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in December 2022.
It would also be the biggest exchange since 2010, when 14 suspected spies were swapped between Russia and the West. They included double agent Sergei Skripal, sent by Moscow to Britain, and Russian undercover agent Anna Chapman, sent by Washington to Russia.
Until then, only during the Cold War had there been major exchanges of more than a dozen people between the Soviet and Western powers in 1985 and 1986.
Several prisoners transferred
Rumours of an imminent prisoner swap had been rife in recent days after a number of high-profile inmates, including foreigners, were moved from Russian jails where they were serving long sentences.
At the same time, data on several Russians serving sentences in the United States have disappeared from the US Bureau of Prisons database. These include Alexander Vinnik, Maxim Marchenko, Vadim Konoshchenko and Vladislav Klyushin.
At least seven Russian political prisoners have been moved from penal colonies or prisons in recent days, according to lawyers and relatives.
Among them is Ilya Yashin, a prominent Kremlin critic who is serving an eight-and-a-half-year sentence for criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine. He has been transferred from prison to an unknown destination, his lawyer Tatyana Solomina said on Tuesday.
Also transferred were Oleg Orlov, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning president of the human rights group Memorial, who was sentenced to 2½ years in February; musician Alexandra Skochilenko, who is serving 7 years for replacing price tags in a supermarket with messages condemning the killing of civilians in Ukraine; and Navalny’s former regional coordinators Lillia Chanysheva and Ksenia Fadeyeva, who were sentenced to 9½ years and 9 years.
Also on Tuesday, Memorial reported that German-born Russian citizen Kevin Liik, sentenced to four years for allegedly providing information to German special services, has been released from prison.
According to the Russian media The Insider, Ilya Yashin, Oleg Orlov, Alexandra Skochilenko, Lillia Chanysheva, Ksenia Fadeyeva, Kevin Lik, will be released. The media also mentions the prisoners Alsu Kurmasheva, Andrei Pivovarov, Rico Krieger, Kevin Lik, Demuri Voronin, Vadim Ostanin, Patrick Schobel and Herman Moyzhes.
Russian authorities routinely transfer prisoners without warning their lawyers or relatives, and some do not appear for weeks. In December, Navalny was transferred without warning from a prison in central Russia to one above the Arctic Circle, a journey he said took 20 days. He died of unexplained causes in prison in February.
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