Russia releases US journalist in multi-nation prisoner swap, two Russian prisoners also freed

Russia has released an American journalist Ivan Gershkovich and a former US Marine Paul Whelan as part of a prisoner swap deal involving several countries. In return, 26 prisoners were released on Thursday. Apart from this, two Russian prisoners convicted of espionage were also released. According to news agency Reuters, this prisoner deal is the largest swap between Russia and America in the post-Soviet history. This deal took place in Ankara, the capital of Turkey.

Apart from the US and Russia, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway and Belarus were also part of the swap deal. According to Turkish officials, 10 prisoners, including two minors, were taken to Russia, 13 to Germany and three to the US. In Russia, Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was arrested in March 2023 on charges of espionage. The US government denied this. He was later sentenced to 16 years in a high-security Russian prison.

The Wall Street Journal said in a statement that he was facing “a false and baseless charge.” President Joe Biden called Gershkovic’s detention “completely illegal.”

Whelan, a former Marine who worked as a corporate security executive from Michigan, was detained in Moscow in 2018 and convicted of espionage. He was serving a 16-year sentence in a Russian prison. Whelan and the US government have denied that he is a spy. The US declared him ‘wrongly detained’.

Thursday’s swap also involved Vadim Krasikov, a colonel in the Russian FSB security service who was serving a life sentence in Germany for the murder of an exiled Chechen-Georgian dissident in a Berlin park. President Vladimir Putin had previously expressed a desire to send him back to Russia.

Slovenia releases two Russian prisoners convicted of espionage
Two Russian prisoners convicted by a Slovenian espionage court are among more than two dozen who were released on Thursday (1 August) in the biggest prisoner swap since the Cold War. Artem Viktorovich Dultsev and Anna Valerevna Dultseva were sentenced to one year and seven months in prison in a secret trial on Wednesday (31 July) after pleading guilty to charges of espionage and using false identities.