“By the way, I’d like to congratulate Vladimir Putin for doing a lot more,” Trump said at a Saturday rally with supporters in the US state of Georgia, which was posted complete on YouTube by pro-Trump Fox News.
“Did you see the deal we made? Look, we want to get people home,” Trump said, adding that the West sent out “some of the biggest murderers in the world” in exchange for them.
“They got some of the worst killers. We got our people back, but I mean, we made terrible, terrible deals. It’s nice to say we got them back, but doesn’t that set a bad precedent?” Trump said in a slightly confused speech.
While praising Putin, Trump did not mention President Joe Biden, who has been negotiating with the Russian side for months. On the other hand, in a speech shortly after the successful handover of the prisoners, Biden thanked Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway and also Turkey, where the exchange took place at the port- air in Ankara.
The largest prisoner exchange since the Cold War took place on the evening of Thursday, August 1. The two sides exchanged a total of 24 prisoners and two children belonging to a Russian spy family. As part of the exchange, the Russian Federation released The Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich, Marine Paul Whelan and Russian-American journalist Alsa Kurmasheva.
Vadim Krasikov, who was serving a life sentence in Germany for the murder of Georgian-born Chechen Zelimkhan Changoshvili in 2019, also traveled to Russia. The Slovenians handed over two Russian spies, Artem and Anna Dultseva, and their children. The Roman hacker Seleznev also returned to Moscow.
It is the largest prisoner exchange between the West and Russia since the beginning of the Cold War
Europe
2024-08-05 10:31:40
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