Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to the head of the Republic of Mordovia Artem Zdunov during their meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Aug. 1, 2024. (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) – A massive prisoner swap involving the United States and Russia was underway Thursday, a person familiar with the matter said.
The person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because details had not been publicly disclosed, did not specify who is included in the deal. But Americans considered by the U.S. to be 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 U.S. government considered baseless.
The deal would be the latest exchange in the last two years between Washington and Moscow, following a December 2022 trade that brought WNBA star Brittney Griner back to the U.S. in exchange for notorious arms trafficker Viktor Bout.
Russia has long been interested in getting back Vadim Krasikov, who was convicted in Germany in 2021 of killing a former Chechen rebel in a Berlin park two years earlier, apparently on the orders of Moscow’s security services.
Speculation had mounted for weeks that a swap was near because of a confluence of unusual developments, including a startingly quick trial and conviction for Gershkovich that Washington regarded as a sham. He was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum-security prison.
Also in recent days, several other figures imprisoned in Russia for speaking out against the war in Ukraine or over their work with the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny were moved from prison to unknown locations.
Gershkovich was arrested March 29, 2023, while on a reporting trip to the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg. Authorities claimed, without offering any evidence, that he was gathering secret information for the U.S. The son of Soviet emigres 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 over the extension of his pretrial detention or appeals for his release. He was taken to the courthouse in handcuffs and appeared in the defendants’ cage, often smiling for the many cameras.
U.S. officials last year made an offer to swap Gershkovich that was rejected by Russia, and Biden’s Democratic administration had not made public any possible deals since then.
Gershkovich was designated as wrongfully detained, as was Whelan, who was detained in December 2018 after traveling to Russia for a wedding. Whelan was convicted of espionage charges, which he and the U.S. have also said were false and trumped up, and he was serving a 16-year prison sentence.
Whelan had been excluded from prior high-profile deals involving Russia, including the April 2022 swap by Moscow of imprisoned Marine veteran Trevor Reed for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot convicted in a drug trafficking conspiracy. That December, the U.S. released notorious arms trafficker Viktor Bout in exchange for getting back WNBA star Brittney Griner, who’d been jailed on drug charges.
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Litvinova reported from Tallinn, Estonia.
