WASHINGTON — A large-scale prisoner swap took place between the United States and Russia on Thursday, an insider said.
The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because details have not been made public, did not specify who is involved in the deal. But Americans the U.S. considers wrongfully detained in Russia include Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, a corporate security executive from Michigan.
Both had been convicted of espionage charges that the US government considered baseless.
The deal would be the last in the past two years between Washington and Moscow, following a December 2022 trade that saw WNBA star Brittney Griner return to the U.S. in exchange for notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout.
Russia has long been interested in getting back Vadim Krasikovwho was convicted in Germany in 2021 for the murder of a former Chechen rebel in a Berlin park two years earlier, apparently on orders from Moscow’s security services.
For weeks, there has been speculation that a trade was imminent due to a confluence of unusual developments, including an initially speedy trial and conviction for Gershkovich which Washington considered a sham. He was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum security prison.
Also the past few days, several other figures captured in Russia for speaking out against the war in Ukraine or for their cooperation with the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, were transferred from prison to unknown locations.
Gershkovich was arrested on March 29, 2023, during a reporting trip to the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg. Authorities alleged, without providing evidence, that he was gathering classified information for the United States. The son of Soviet émigrés who settled in New Jersey, he moved to the country in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times newspaper before being hired by the Journal in 2022.
He had more than a dozen closed hearings on extensions of his pretrial detention or appeals for his release. He was brought to court in handcuffs and appeared in the defendants’ cage, often smiling for the many cameras.
Last year, US officials made an offer to swap Gershkovich, but Russia rejected it. Since then, the Biden administration has not publicly announced any potential deal.
Gershkovich was ruled to have been wrongfully detained, as was Whelan, who was detained in December 2018 after traveling to Russia for a wedding. Whelan was convicted of espionage charges that he and the U.S. also said were false and trumped-up, and served a 16-year prison sentence.
Whelan has been excluded from previous high-profile deals with Russia, including the April 2022 deal Moscow exchanges captured Marine veteran Trevor Reed for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot convicted of a drug trafficking plot. That December, the U.S. notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout released in exchange for the return of WNBA star Brittney Griner, who was jailed on drug charges.
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Litvinova reported from Tallinn, Estonia.
