Four U.S. residents wrongly imprisoned in Russia — including journalist Evan Gershkovich and Marine veteran Paul Whelan — were released Thursday, part of a major multinational prisoner exchange the likes of which has not been seen since the Cold War.
The massive deal, cut among seven nations, involves 24 people, including five Germans and seven Russian citizens held in Russia, and eight Russians imprisoned in the U.S., Germany, Slovenia, Norway and Poland.
President Joe Biden called the deal that had led to the release of the four U.S. detainees a “feat of diplomacy and friendship.”
The exchange took place in Turkey, and a plane carrying U.S. citizens Gershkovich, Whelan and Alsu Kurmasheva touched down at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland at 11:38 p.m.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris greeted all three Americans on the tarmac, and each then hugged friends and family to applause. Biden said he told each, “welcome home,” and more.
“There’s nothing beyond our capacity when we act together,” Biden told reporters when asked if he had a message for America. “We’re the United States of America.”
Vladimir Kara-Murza, a legal permanent U.S. resident, had planned to go Germany, where his family was set to meet him, but is expected to return to the U.S. soon, the administration said.
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“Now, their brutal ordeal is over and they’re free,” Biden said in a televised address from the White House earlier Thursday as he stood alongside family members of those freed. “This is an incredible relief for all the family members gathered here. It’s relief to the friends and colleagues all across the country who have been praying for this day for a long time.”
Gershkovich, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, was arrested in March 2023 while reporting in Yekaterinburg, an industrial city east of Moscow. In July, he was convicted of espionage in a Russian court in a trial widely condemned as a sham as his publication vociferously advocated for his release across its front pages. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison.
Whelan, a businessman who has been detained since visiting Russia for a friend’s wedding in 2018, was also convicted of espionage and had been serving a 16-year sentence in a penal colony. The U.S. has denied those charges.
Whelan was excluded from two previous exchanges, and in an interview from prison in December, Whelan told the BBC that he considered the United States’ decision to leave him behind a “serious betrayal.”
Kurmasheva is a journalist with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr. is a dual Russian British national and U.S. permanent resident who was jailed on treason charges for 25 years in April 2023. Biden noted that Kara-Murza was a pallbearer during the funeral of Sen. John McCain.
At one point during his national address, Biden took Kurmasheva’s daughter’s hand and sang a few lines of “Happy Birthday” to her.
In a statement, Emma Tucker, The Wall Street Journal’s editor-in-chief, said, “Today is a joyous day for the safe return of our colleague Evan Gershkovich.”
“All those who spoke up for Evan and worked for his release … can know that their support made a huge difference and is greatly, greatly appreciated,” Tucker added.
The complex prisoner swap is a rare example of cooperation amid heightened political tensions between the U.S. and Russia, including sanctions imposed on Russia and Russian officials over the invasion of Ukraine starting in 2022. Relations between the two countries had been strained before the war, following Russian interference in the 2016 election and its annexation of Crimea.
The most notable Russian prisoner released as part of the swap is Vadim Krasikov, who was jailed for life in Germany for the 2019 murder in Berlin of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a former Chechen separatist, in what prosecutors believed was a Russian state-sanctioned assassination. Russian authorities said they believed Khangoshvili was involved in multiple attacks on Russian soil, including the 2010 suicide bombings on the Moscow Metro.
The U.S. released three Russian prisoners, including an intelligence operative facing charges of smuggling U.S. technology and ammunition to the Russian military. Slovenia released two Russian prisoners; Norway and Poland each released one.
Russia released five German prisoners, as well as seven Russian citizens who were political prisoners held in their own country, according to a statement from the White House. Later, Biden said four of them were connected to opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in prison in February following a yearslong struggle against official corruption and President Vladimir Putin’s government that included several poisoning attempts.
Former Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev responded to the swap by saying that he would like “the traitors of Russia to rot in prison or die in jail, as has often happened. But it is more useful to get out our own, who worked for the country, for the Fatherland, for all of us.”
“And let the traitors now feverishly select new names and actively disguise themselves under a witness protection program,” he added.
The Biden administration has been working on Thursday’s swap since December 2022 after WNBA star Brittney Griner was exchanged for notorious Russian arms dealer Victor Bout, known as the “Merchant of Death.”
Griner was arrested at an airport near Moscow after two vape cartridges containing hashish oil were found in her luggage.
The swap raised a debate about the risks of exchanging wrongfully detained Americans for Russian prisoners, with critics pointing out that there was no equivalence between the crimes Griner and Bout were convicted of, and that it may encourage foreign adversaries to kidnap Americans abroad and use them as bargaining chips.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan called the exchange “historic” and said that not since the Cold War has there been one involving such a large number of people, “and there has never, so far as we know, been an exchange involving so many countries, so many close U.S. partners and allies working together.”
The deal was “the culmination of many rounds of complex, painstaking negotiations over many, many months,” he added.
Biden said on the tarmac of Joint Base Andrews that other countries made difficult decisions in making the exchange happen. He singled out Germany, which agreed to release a convicted hitman who killed someone in Berlin, and the chancellor of Slovenia.
“The toughest call on this one was for other countries, because I asked them to do some things that were against their immediate self-interests,” Biden said. “And it was very difficult for them to do.”