US and Russia carry out massive prisoner exchange

Moscow. Long prepared in the strictest confidence by Kremlin and White House negotiators, with the mediation of Turkey, the largest prisoner exchange since the time of the so-called “Semitic War” finally took place at Ankara airport on Thursday. cold War.

The unusual exchange, at one of the most tense moments between Russia and the United States and its allies, enabled Moscow to secure the release of eight Russians imprisoned in the United States, Germany, Norway, Poland and Slovenia, while the West secured the release of 11 Russians and five Germans imprisoned in Russia (one of them in Belarus).

In the evening, according to a local television report, President Vladimir Putin went to the official Vnukovo-2 airport to meet the plane that brought the Russian prisoners to Moscow, thank them for “their loyalty to Russia” and tell them that “the motherland has not forgotten them for a single minute.” Putin announced that he will award them with decorations.

The result of this game of chance, in which the pieces to be exchanged ended up behind bars for crimes both real and invented out of necessity, satisfied the main players, Russia and the United States, who got what they wanted more than anything – Moscow to bring back the FSB agent imprisoned in Germany and Washington, the three Americans convicted in Russia – although there are still many prisoners from both countries who could be part of future exchanges.

Washington was able to release Evan Gershkovich, correspondent of the Wall Street JournalAlsu Kurmasheva, editor of the Tatarstan and Bashkiria version of the station Radio Liberty funded by the US government, and Paul Whelan, a former marine, who were convicted of espionage and she of spreading “fake news” about the Russian military.

He also secured the release of three of Russia’s leading opposition figures, Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is accused of extremism and high treason and has a US residency card, as well as Ilia Yashin, one of the Russian president’s biggest critics, and Oleg Orlov, co-director of the human rights NGO Memorial, who were imprisoned for spreading “fake news” about the military operation in Ukraine.

Five other Kremlin opponents also benefited from the deal: Ksenia Fadeyeva, Lilia Chanysheva and Vadim Ostanin, considered “extremists” for heading regional offices of the Anti-Corruption Fund of the late Aleksei Navalny, who died in prison in February this year; Andrei Pivovarov, director of Open Russia, classified as an “undesirable organization”; and Sasha Skochilenko, a musician and poet whose crime was distributing anti-war leaflets in a supermarket.

Finally, three Russians with dual German nationality were released from prison: Demuri Voronin (Dieter Woronin, according to his passport), a political scientist; Kevin Lik, a 19-year-old activist; and German Moishes, a lawyer, who have been charged with high treason.

And two German citizens, Patrick Shebel, arrested in St. Petersburg for drug possession, and the mercenary Rico Krieger, sentenced to death in Belarus for “terrorism” and pardoned by President Aleksandr Lukashenko.

Moishes and Shebel had not yet been sentenced and Krieger was not in Russia, so Putin, according to the Kremlin press service, signed only thirteen pardons.

In exchange for these five Germans, Washington managed to convince Berlin to release Vadim Krasikov, an FSB agent (the Federal Security Service, successor to the Soviet KGB), sentenced to life imprisonment for killing Zelimjan Jangoshvili, a former commander of the Chechen separatists, in a park in the German capital. Interviewed by Tucker Carlson last February, Putin called Krasikov a “patriot”.

The other Russians exchanged are Anna and Artiom Dultsev, who lived in Slovenia and confessed to being spies under false identities as Argentines (they were able to travel to Moscow with their two minor children); Mikhail Mikushin, an academic at the University of Tromso in Norway who posed as a Brazilian and admitted to working for a Russian intelligence agency; and Pablo Gonzalez (Pavel Rubtsov, according to his Russian passport), a Russian-born Spanish journalist held in Poland without charge on suspicion of allegedly spying for Russia’s military intelligence directorate.

As part of the agreement, Roman Selezniov, son of a deputy of the federal Duma, was released from US prisons. hackerarrested in the Maldives and convicted in the United States for stealing $169 million from people and institutions in that country; Vladislav Kliushin, an apparent former Russian military intelligence agent, convicted of several crimes related to new technologies; and Vadim Konoschenok, arrested in Estonia and extradited to the US for acquiring equipment and electronic components for Russia’s military industry.

As if it were the script of a thriller being filmed in real time, in recent days multiple indications have accumulated that a major prisoner exchange was underway, with neither party confirming nor denying it.

First, attention was drawn to the almost simultaneous “disappearance” of the Russians held in different penitentiary centres, without their lawyers being able to find out where their clients were, to the distress of their families.

Experts then began to detect strange flights by official aircraft linked to the FSB to cities near the places of detention of the now participants in the exchange, while the three Russians who were imprisoned in the United States stopped appearing in the public database of the US prison system.

And on Thursday it was surprising that the texts of several decrees signed by Putin were not published, only their numbers being mentioned, which turned out to be those of the pardons.

After the exchange was confirmed, Russian television, in reporting the news, limited itself to a brief FSB statement, where it reported that “eight Russian citizens, detained and imprisoned in different NATO countries (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) returned to their homeland” and that “the Russian citizens were exchanged with a group of individuals who acted in the interests of foreign states and to the detriment of Russian security.”

In the United States, President Joe Biden hailed the negotiations that led to the exchange as a “diplomatic feat.” “Some of these women and men have been unjustly detained for years. They have all endured unimaginable suffering and uncertainty. Today, their agony is over,” Biden was quoted as saying by news agencies.