Joyful news tainted with fears of ‘abductor states’
The release of The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich after 491 days in captivity in Russia, former US Marine Paul Whelan, who had been held since 2018, and 14 others wrongly imprisoned under Vladimir Putin’s tyrannical regime is an immense relief and joy for each of them and for their loved ones. Gershkovich’s ordeal sent a frightening message – that reporting the truth from Russia is an occupational hazard. The prisoners’ freedom was secured after months of negotiations between the US and Russia that also involved other nations such as Germany, Poland, Slovenia and Norway. Those incarcerated were freed under the biggest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War. Ten Russian prisoners, mainly spies and an assassin, and two of their children, were returned under the deal.
The release of Russian assassin and intelligence colonel Vadim Krasikov was especially prized by Putin and was probably the linchpin for the deal. Krasikov killed a Chechen emigre in a public park in Berlin in 2019 and was serving a life sentence. He also was linked to numerous murders of Putin opponents in Russia. Another Russian set free was Roman Seleznev, whom the US sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2017 for his part in a $US50m cyber-fraud ring and for defrauding banks of $US9m through hacking. In 2016, Seleznev was sentenced to 27 years’ jail for hacking into point-of-sale computers to steal and sell credit card numbers to the criminal underworld. While it became necessary to trade such arch criminals for innocent lives, there is no moral equivalency between them – much less between the democracies that sought to end their citizens’ wrongful captivity and the Russian dictator behind the problem.
Conclusion of the complicated deal is a diplomatic high point for Joe Biden in his final months as President. It left Donald Trump looking foolish after he boasted in May that Putin would release Gershkovich “for me, but not for anyone else”. That patently false prediction, Washington correspondent Adam Creighton writes, must “also cast doubt on Mr Trump’s other foreign policy claims: that only he can end the war between Russia and Ukraine (and within 24 hours, for that matter!), that foreign leaders uniquely respected him and only he can avert World War III”. Mr Trump’s social media post when news of the prisoner exchange broke – “Are we also paying them cash? … Our ‘negotiators’ are always an embarrassment to us” – also would have rubbed many voters up the wrong way.
The exchange raises alarming security issues that warrant serious debate from both sides of US politics and other nations, not throwaway lines. Welcome as it was, the swap is emblematic of an era of state-sponsored hostage-taking by tyrannical governments – what US officials call “abductor states” – seeking leverage over the free world. It also offers sobering evidence of the asymmetry between the US and Russia (and potentially other autocracies) in what The Wall Street Journal termed “this new piratical order”. While Putin can order foreigners to be plucked off the street or from restaurants, subjected to secret trials and given long sentences in Soviet-era gulags, no Western leader, fortunately, can do the same.
The ugly strategy works because of pressure on democratic leaders to secure hostages’ release and because leaders such as Putin pay no meaningful price for their actions. After Gershkovich’s arrest on an assignment for The Wall Street Journal, for example, the Biden administration neither arrested any Russians nor expelled any Russian journalists or diplomats. If others are to be spared the ordeal suffered by Gershkovich, Western leaders need more effective strategies to deter dictator and terrorist states, including China and Iran, from using Western hostages for leverage. It is now a pressing issue in strategic politics.