A reporter, a Russian killer and everyone else freed in the prisoner swap

By Ivan Nechepurenko, Valerie Hopkins and Alina Lobzina

August 2, 2024 — 3.30pm

Twenty-four prisoners were freed Thursday in a multi-country exchange in Turkey, marking one of the broadest exchanges between Russia and the West in years.

Here’s what to know about all of the prisoners who were exchanged in the swap.

Released by Russia were:

Three American citizens;
Six other Western prisoners;
Four political prisoners and human rights advocates;
Three Russians with ties to former Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

And released by the West:

Eight prisoners, including Vadim Krasikov, who assassinated a Chechen separatist in Berlin.

Reporter Evan Gershkovich hugs his mother, Ella Milman, on his return to the US.Credit: AP

The released Americans

Evan Gershkovich
A reporter for The Wall Street Journal, the 32-year-old was detained by masked security service agents in March 2023 during a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg, a major Russian industrial hub about 850 miles east of Moscow. Shortly after, he was charged with espionage, the first such case against a Western reporter since 1986.

In their indictment, Russian prosecutors accused Gershkovich of using “painstaking conspiratorial methods” to obtain “secret information” about a Russian military-industrial facility that produces tanks and other weapons. Gershkovich, his employer and the US government have denied the charges and called them politically motivated.

Alsu Kurmasheva aboard a plane home after being freed.Credit: AP

On July 19, a Russian court in Yekaterinburg sentenced Gershkovich to 16 years in a high-security penal colony in a swift trial that only took three hearings to complete.

Alsu Kurmasheva
The Russian-American editor working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a broadcaster funded by the US government, was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in a Russian penal colony for “spreading false information” about the Russian army. The charge is broadly used by the Kremlin to stifle criticism of the war in Ukraine.

Kurmasheva, 47, lived in Prague for more than two decades with her husband and two daughters. She was arrested during her trip to Kazan, her hometown about 500 miles east of Moscow. She was first fined for failing to report her American citizenship and then accused of failing to register as a “foreign agent” and put in pretrial detention.

In December, she was also charged with spreading false information about the Russian army. The charges were related to a book Kurmasheva edited that featured 40 Russians who opposed the invasion of Ukraine.

Paul Whelan, a former US Marine who was arrested for alleged spying in Moscow in 2018, was released.Credit: AP

Paul Whelan
The 54-year-old former US Marine who had served in Iraq, was attending a friend’s wedding in Moscow at the Metropol Hotel when he was arrested on December 28, 2018.

Whelan had made several previous trips to Russia, so he readily accepted a flash drive that a Russian friend said contained pictures of his travels. Russian agents then swooped down, claiming the drive held classified Russian military information.

Whelan is a citizen of the United States, Canada, Britain and Ireland. He was sentenced to 16 years in a high-security penal colony, where he was forced to sew industrial garments and suffered at least one assault by another inmate. He spoke out repeatedly about being left behind while other Americans were exchanged.

Other Western prisoners

Vladimir Kara-Murza
A veteran Russian activist, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for treason, the longest sentence given to an opposition politician in modern Russia. Kara-Murza, 42, drew the Kremlin’s ire when he lobbied in Washington for the use of sanctions to punish Russian government officials engaged in human rights abuses. Earlier this year, Kara-Murza, a Russian-British national and permanent resident of the United States, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in commentary for columns he had written in his prison cell and published in The Washington Post.

Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza is escorted to a hearing in a court in Moscow in 2023.Credit: AP

Kara-Murza twice survived what he characterised as government attempts to poison him. Both times he was hospitalised in critical condition with organ failure.

Kevin Lick
Kevin Lick, a German-born Russian high school student, was sentenced to four years in a penal colony in 2023 on charges of state treason. According to Russian prosecutors, Lick, 19, was sending photographs of Russian troop dislocations to a foreign state representative. At the time of his crime, Lick was still a teenager in a school in the Russian southern town of Maikop.

Rico Krieger
Rico Krieger is a German citizen who in June was sentenced to death by a court in Belarus on terrorism and other charges. In a murky case, Krieger, who formerly worked for the German Red Cross, was accused of planting explosives that blew up railway tracks in Belarus, according to Russian media outlets. Krieger told Belarusian state media that he was acting under instructions from Ukrainian special services.

On Tuesday, Krieger was pardoned by President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, one of the Kremlin’s closest allies.

Dieter (Demuri) Voronin
In March 2023, Moscow City Court sentenced Demuri Voronin, a political scientist, to more than 13 years in a high-security penal colony on charges of state treason. A Russian-German national, Voronin, was detained in February 2021 and charged with being implicated in the case of Ivan Safronov, a Russian journalist who was accused of state treason for passing classified information to foreign nationals and sentenced to 22 years in a high-security penal colony. Safronov’s lawyers said he was only using publicly available information in his work.

Patrick Schöbel
A citizen of Germany, Patrick Schöbel was detained upon arrival from Hamburg via Istanbul in the St. Petersburg airport and accused of smuggling drugs. When searched, a pack of “Fink Green Goldbears” with six gummies containing cannabis was found in his luggage, according to Tass, a Russian state news agency. He had not yet been convicted when he was released.

German Moyzhes
A Russian-German national, German Moyzhes is a lawyer who was helping Russians obtain residence permits in Germany and other EU countries. At the end of May, Moyzhes, who is also a leading cycling activist in St. Petersburg, was arrested and accused of committing state treason. His trial was still pending at the time of his exchange.

Russian political prisoners and human rights advocates

Russian opposition activist Ilya Yashin.Credit: AP

Ilya Yashin
A long-time fixture of Russian opposition politics, Ilya Yashin was sentenced in December 2022 to eight-and-a-half years in prison after a court found him guilty on charges of “spreading false information” about atrocities committed by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, near Kyiv.

Previously, Yashin served as chair of a municipal council in one of Moscow’s districts and took part in many anti-Kremlin protests. After the death of Alexei Navalny, Yashin, 41, is considered to be one of the most popular Russian opposition leaders.

Andrei Pivovarov
Andrei Pivovarov is a Russian opposition politician who had been particularly active in St Petersburg. In July 2022, Pivovarov, 42, was sentenced to four years in a penal colony for being involved with an undesirable organisation, a legal term that has been introduced in Russia to outlaw unwanted groups.

Oleg Orlov
A veteran activist and human rights defender, Oleg Orlov, 71, served as a leading member of Memorial, one of the oldest human rights organisations in Russia.

Over years, the Russian state grew increasingly wary of Memorial and its members. In 2021, a Russian court ordered it to be dissolved for failure to fulfil its duties as a “foreign agent” after the government designated the group as such. In February, a Moscow court sentenced Orlov to two-and-a-half years in prison for repeatedly discrediting Russia’s military by voicing his opposition to the war in Ukraine.

Aleksandra Y. Skochilenko
Aleksandra Y. Skochilenko, 33, is a Russian pacifist artist who in November 2023 was sentenced to seven years in a penal colony for leaving price tags with small anti-war messages in a supermarket.

Skochilenko was arrested in April 2022, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Her arrest has become one of the most prominent examples of the Kremlin’s determination to stifle all anti-war dissent in the country.

Aleksandra Y. Skochilenko, a 33-year-old artist and musician.Credit: AP

Russians with ties to Alexei Navalny

Lilia Chanysheva
Lilia Chanysheva, 42, was the head of Alexei Navalny’s office in the Russian city of Ufa. She was arrested in November 2021 and accused of taking part in an extremist organisation. In June 2023, a court sentenced Chanysheva to seven-and-a-half years in prison. In April, a court revised her sentence to nine-and-a-half years.

Ksenia V. Fadeyeva
Ksenia Fadeyeva, 32, was the head of Navalny’s office in Tomsk, a major university town in Siberia. In 2020, Fadeyeva defeated pro-Kremlin candidates to get elected to Tomsk’s city legislature. In December 2023, a Russian court sentenced her to nine years in a penal colony for her affiliation with Navalny’s political organisation, which was outlawed as extremist in Russia.

Vadim Ostanin
Vadim Ostanin was the head of Navalny’s office in Barnaul, Siberia. In July 2023, he was sentenced to nine years in a penal colony after being accused of being involved in an extremist group after a Russian court outlawed Navalny’s political network across Russia.

Prisoners released by the West

Vladimir Putin and, inset, Vadim Krasikov.Credit: AP

Vadim Krasikov
Vadim Krasikov, 58, is a Russian citizen who was sentenced to life in prison in Germany in 2021 for the brazen assassination of a Chechen separatist fighter in broad daylight in a park in central Berlin in 2019. German prosecutors indicated in their case that Krasikov worked for the Russian Federal Security Service, the most powerful security agency in Russia. The German judge suggested Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the killing, but the Kremlin denied involvement.

In a televised interview in February, Putin spoke glowingly of Krasikov, saying that he was a person who, “due to patriotic sentiments, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals”.

Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva
Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva are believed to be part of Russia’s “illegals” program, a Soviet-era scheme in which Russian spies pose as ordinary citizens of another country.

Legally married, the pair pleaded guilty before a Slovenian court on Wednesday to charges of spying and falsifying documents. They had posed as an Argentine couple, reportedly even speaking to their two children in Spanish. The pair’s two children were taken into foster care after their arrest, as they continued to attend their private school, the Guardian reported. There are two minors reportedly involved in the exchange believed to be their children.

Mikhail Mikushin
In 2022, Norwegian law enforcement arrested and identified Mikhail Mikushin, a researcher at the University of Tromso, as a Russian spy. According to Norwegian news outlets, when detained by local law enforcement in 2022, Mikushin pretended to be a Brazilian citizen. He later admitted in court that he was a Russian citizen.

Pavel Rubtsov
Pavel Rubtsov was arrested in February 2022 as a Russian spy in Poland. He was born in Moscow in 1982, but nine years later, he moved to Spain. Upon arrest, he identified himself as a Spanish journalist called Pablo González. Rubtsov, 42, was accused of spying for Russia, a charge he denied, saying he was just a freelance journalist.

Roman Seleznev
Roman Seleznev is a Russian hacker arrested in the United States and sentenced to 14 years in prison after pleading guilty to playing a key role in a $50 million cyberfraud ring and defrauding banks of $9 million through a hacking scheme.

Vladislav Klyushin
Vladislav Klyushin is a Russian hacker who gained access to private corporate earnings records as part of what the US Department of Justice labelled a “$93 billion hack-to-trade scheme.” Arrested in Switzerland in 2021 and extradited to the United States later that year, he was sentenced in federal court last September to nine years in prison. Klyushin denied involvement in the scheme.

Vadim Konoshchenok
Vadim Konoshchenok was among five Russians accused in 2023 of conspiring to obtain military-grade technologies from US companies for Russia’s defence sector. He is accused of being an operative of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the KGB. He was arrested in Estonia in December 2022 and extradited to the United States.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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