Russia prisoner exchange: Three US citizens to be released

Image source, Reuters

Matt Murphy & Hafsa Khalil

BBC News

The US has confirmed 24 people were involved in a prisoner exchange between Russia and some Western countries including the US and Germany.

Among the prisoners released are the US citizens Evan Gershkovich – a Wall Street Journal reporter – and former US Marine Paul Whelan.

As part of the deal, Russian security service hitman Vadim Krasikov has been freed by Germany.

There has been days of speculation about a major swap between Russia and Western countries, which was heightened after several prisoners were moved from their prison cells in Russian jails to unknown locations.

US journalist Evan Gershkovich was sentenced to 16 years in a high-security penal colony earlier this month, after being convicted on espionage charges.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter was first arrested last March while on a reporting trip in the city of Yekaterinburg, about 1,600km (1,000 miles) east of Moscow, by security services.

Prosecutors accused him of working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), accusations that Mr Gershkovich, the WSJ and the US government vociferously deny.

It marked the first conviction of a US journalist for espionage in Russia since the Cold War ended more than 30 years ago. After his initial arrest he was held in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison.

Paul Whelan, 54, was given a 16-year jail sentence in 2020 after being arrested in Moscow on suspicion of spying in 2018.

The ex-US Marine is a citizen of four countries – the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland. His lawyer said he was being held in a prison in the Mordovia region.

After being discharged from the military in 2008 for bad conduct, he become a security consultant and started to travel back and forth to Russia for work.

In December 2018, he was arrested by Russia’s FSB state security agency, which claimed he had been “caught spying” in Moscow. His family has always denied the charges.

On the same day Mr Gershkovich was convicted, Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in a medium-security prison after a secret trial.

She was an editor for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which is funded by the US government, and was convicted of spreading false information about the Russian military.

Her husband Pavel Butorin previously said she was arrested over a book published last year, which was a collection of stories about Russians opposed to the war in Ukraine.

Ms Kurmasheva holds US and Russian citizenship and lived in Prague with her husband and two daughters. She was detained in June 2023 while visiting her mother in Russia.

Vladimir Kara-Murza is a prominent Russian dissident and one of the most vocal opponents of the Putin regime, and an outspoken critic of the war in Ukraine and the internal crackdown on dissent in Russia.

In 2023, the 42-year-old was sentenced to 25 years in prison for spreading “false” information about the Russian army and being affiliated with an “undesirable organisation”.

Mr Kara-Murza – a former journalist and politician – denied all the charges.

The dual British-Russian citizen had spent his term in a prison colony in Siberia, where his wife said he developed a neurological condition as a result of being poisoned.

One of Russia’s most prominent opposition figures, Ilya Yashin was jailed in 2022 for “spreading fake news” about the country’s military.

He was arrested after he condemned suspected Russian war crimes in Bucha.

Following the death of former opposition leader Alexei Navalny in prison, Mr Yashin said he feared for his life.

He previously accused President Vladimir Putin of going “mad with power” in a series of letters from the prison in the western Smolensk region where he was being held.

Oleg Orlov is a Russian human rights activist who was jailed in February for calling Russia a fascist state and criticising the war in Ukraine. He was previously the chair of the Nobel Prize-winning organisation Memorial.

The 71-year-old was handed a two-and-a-half-year term for “repeatedly discrediting” the Russian armed forces.

In an appeal aginst his sentence in July, he compared the Russian justice system to that of Nazi Germany.

His sentencing followed a retrial. In the original trial in October last year, he received a 150,000 rouble fine (£1,290; $1,630) and walked free from the court. His later conviction marked a hardening of repressions against opponents of the war.

Lilia Chanysheva was sentenced to nine-and-a-half years in prison earlier this year after being accused of extremism by authorities.

She had served as a local coordinator with the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption network.

Initially sentenced to seven years in 2023, prosecutors appealed against the sentence and told officials it was too lenient. She was most recently held at a centre in the Perm region.

Ms Chanysheva was the first of Mr Navalny’s allies sentenced on the charge. Most of his other activists have fled Russia into exile.

Image source, Getty Images

Ksenia Fadeyeva was sentenced to nine years in prison by authorities after she was accused of organising an extremist group.

She had been a local organiser with Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation in the Siberian city of Tomsk, where she was subsequently detained.

Her lawyers argued that she had ended her association with the organisation before it was designated an extremist group in 2021.

Most of Mr Navalny’s former staff and allies have been forced to flee Russia into exile in recent years, as the Kremlin has ramped up repression of opposition groups.

Sasha Skochilenko was sentenced to seven years in a penal colony for replacing supermarket pricing labels with anti-war messages in November as a form of protest.

The replacement labels drew attention to civilian deaths in Mariupol and said Russia had become a “fascist state”.

The artist from St Petersburg had been held in a detention centre in the city since April 2023.

German-Russian citizen Kevin Lik was convicted of treason as a teenager, becoming the youngest person ever to be found guilty of the crime.

He grew up in Germany and moved to Russia when he was 12.

Authorities sentenced him to four years in prison last December for supposedly emailing pictures to “representatives of a foreign state” prior to and throughout Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The court claimed he had visited and photographed “deployment sites” of Russian troops.

German national Rico Krieger was accused of planting explosives in Belarus and sentenced to death, before being pardoned by the country’s leader Alexander Lukashenko earlier this week.

In a heavily choreographed interview on state-controlled media, he said he was acting on instruction from Ukraine, but no evidence was given.

He is believed to have been the first Western citizen ever to be given the death penalty in Belarus.

Russian opposition activist Andrei Pivovarov headed the Open Russia foundation, which was established by former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison for campaigning against Mr Putin.

He was arrested in 2021 after trying to leave the country from St Petersburg, accused of directing an “undesirable organisation”.

Russian-German citizen Voronin was sentenced to 13 years in prison on “treason” charges after Moscow alleged he received classified military information from another journalist, Ivan Safronov, who remains behind bars, AFP reported.

Other German citizens released by Russia were:

One of the most high-profile prisoners to be released back to Russia is Federal Security Service (FSB) agent Vadim Krasikov, who was serving a life sentence in Germany for the 2019 murder of an exiled Chechen commander in a Berlin park.

During his trial, prosecutors said he was acting on orders from Russia, and that he belonged to a highly secretive Vympel unit of the FSB.

Lawyers defending him insisted he was a construction worker, not a hitman. He denied being known as Krasikov, and identified himself as Vadim Sokolov, the name on the passport he was travelling with.

In a recent interview with US talk show host Tucker Carlson, Mr Putin hinted his country was seeking “patriot” Krasikov’s release in exchange for US journalist Evan Gershkovich.

Image source, Getty Images

Roman Seleznev was found guilty of running a hacking scheme in 2017 that caused $169m (£131m) in damages.

US officials said he stole credit card data from restaurants, and sold it on the black market. He was sentenced to 27 years in prison for the scheme, which prosecutors say he ran between 2009 and 2013.

According to the Justice Department, Mr Seleznev used software which enabled him to steal millions of credit card numbers from thousands of businesses.

His father is Valery Seleznev, an MP and ally of Mr Putin.

The US charged Vadim Konoshchenok with conspiracy related to procurement and money laundering on behalf of the Russian government in 2022.

He was also thought to have been an FSB agent.

At the time, a statement from the US Department of Justice said he and others unlawfully purchased and exported highly sensitive electronic components, some of which can be used for military purposes.

Husband and wife Artem Viktorovich Dultsev and Anna Valerevna Dultseva were arrested and convicted on espionage charges in Slovenia.

They were each sentenced to 19 months in prison. Their two children also returned to Russia with them.

University lecturer Mikhail Valeryevich Mikushin was charged with gathering intelligence in Norway on behalf of Russia in 2022 while posing as a Brazilian academic.

Norwegian officials said he had a Brazilian passport and had worked as a researcher at the University of Tromso since 2021.

He had reportedly been going by the name José Assis Giammaria.

Mr Mikushin was also believed to have lied about his age, and was in fact 44 rather than 37 when charged.

Less information is publicly available about other Russians included in the exchange.

Vladislav Klyushin, who was sentenced to nine years in prison in the US for insider trading, were also included.

Spanish-Russian journalist Pavel Alekseyevich Rubtsov was arrested in Poland in February 2022, shortly before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Polish authorities accused him of using his freelance journalism work as cover for intelligence activities.

This story will be updated as the names of more released prisoners are confirmed

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