I have waited four hundred and ninety-one days to write this piece. On Thursday, after a year and a half in Russian jail, my friend Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was freed, along with fifteen other prisoners, in a multinational prisoner exchange with Russia, which received eight prisoners in return. It was the largest such deal since the end of the Cold War, and likely the first to include political dissidents since 1986, when Natan Sharansky, a Soviet human-rights activist who later became an Israeli politician, was freed on the Glienicke Bridge, connecting East and West Germany.
The events of Thursday were no less dramatic. Evan was flown on a Russian government plane to an airport in Ankara, Turkey, and then escorted across the tarmac and onto a flight to the U.S. Onboard another flight, headed to Germany, was Vladimir Kara-Murza, a longtime Russian-British activist and politician and a Washington Post contributor, who had spoken widely in the West about the need to confront the Kremlin and who was serving a twenty-five-year prison term; Oleg Orlov, one of the leaders of Memorial, Russia’s premier institution devoted to historical memory and the crimes of the Stalin era, which was dissolved by a Russian court in 2022; Ilya Yashin, among the last opposition politicians to stay in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine; and Sasha Skochilenko, an artist from St. Petersburg who, in the early days of the war, replaced supermarket price tags with stickers describing the horror of Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. (“The Russian army bombed an art school in Mariupol,” one read. “Around four hundred people were hiding inside.”) Three former coördinators for Alexei Navalny’s political movement were also freed, as was the youngest person ever convicted of treason in Russia: Kevin Lik, a teen-ager from a city in the North Caucasus, in southern Russia.
In exchange, the U.S and Germany, along with a number of other European countries, agreed to free a collection of Russian spies, fraudsters, and alleged smugglers. The most notorious among them is the convicted Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov, who, in 2019, shot a former Chechen separatist fighter in Berlin’s Tiergarten park. The open-source investigative outlet Bellingcat linked Krasikov to an élite unit inside the F.S.B., the Russian security service. In court, German prosecutors said that the Russian state was behind the assassination; Krasikov was issued a life sentence, after a court ruled that he was guilty of a “state-contracted killing.”
Freeing Krasikov had become something of an idée fixe for Putin ever since. In his interview with Tucker Carlson, this past February, Putin cited Krasikov in all but name when Carlson pushed him on freeing Evan. “Let me tell you a story about a person serving a sentence in an allied country of the U.S.,” Putin told Carlson. “That person, due to patriotic sentiments, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals.” He added, “We are ready to talk.” Putin’s offer was clear: Evan goes home when Krasikov does.
That was never going to be easy. After all, why should the German government agree to release a murderer convicted of one of the more shocking political killings in the country’s modern history in order to free an American journalist held in a Russian prison? In Putin’s world view, however, countries like Germany don’t have their own autonomous, sovereign geopolitical interests—European capitals are effectively vassals to an omnipotent Washington. Putin likely thought that President Joe Biden could readily convince, if not instruct, the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to release Krasikov in exchange for Evan.
Things became even more complicated after the sudden death of Navalny, in February. Reporting quickly emerged that talks involving German, Russian, and U.S. officials had begun, about the contours of a possible trade, with the German side wanting any deal to include Navalny, who was then being held in a prison colony above the Arctic Circle. Not only was Navalny the signal political prisoner in Russia but, after he was poisoned by Russian agents, in 2020, he made his recovery while living with his wife and two children in Germany. He had become a recognizable and popular figure in the country.
Navalny’s allies claim that an impending trade had convinced Putin to eliminate Navalny. Maria Pevchikh, the head of Navalny’s political foundation, posited that Putin couldn’t tolerate the idea of Navalny’s freedom, and moved to “get rid of the bargaining chip.” Neither Pevchikh nor any of Navalny’s other allies presented evidence to confirm the specificity of this account. But, as the Financial Times reported back in February, “Germany’s appetite for a potential deal with the Kremlin to swap a Russian hitman in a prisoner exchange has cooled markedly.”
That is one reason why so many prisoners and countries were involved in the trade: besides the U.S. and Germany, alleged Russian intelligence operatives were returned from custody in Norway, Poland, and Slovenia. After the death of Navalny, such a large multiparty swap was the only way for all sides to feel that they had got something of sufficient value in the exchange.
The Biden Administration, for its part, wanted the release not only of Evan but also of Paul Whelan, a former U.S. marine and corporate-security manager in his mid-fifties who, in 2018, was arrested in an F.S.B. sting operation in a Moscow hotel room. The White House knew that, for all the fanfare around freeing Brittney Griner, the W.N.B.A. star imprisoned in Russia on drug charges, in a trade for the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, in 2022, they had left someone behind: Whelan. Bringing him and Evan, who was arrested in March of 2023, home was a matter of Biden’s legacy, a feel-good foreign-policy win in the final months of his Presidency.
Germany likely continued to push for a deal that would free not only American citizens but also high-profile Russian dissidents and political prisoners. According to The Insider, an investigative outlet, German officials insisted on a departure from the way in which Putin has historically conducted exchanges—of one for one—instead demanding multiple political prisoners at once for Krasikov. Now, if Scholz and his administration face questions about why they released a state-backed assassin like Krasikov, they can point to the international resonance of figures like Orlov and Kara-Murza, both of whom recently suffered deteriorating health in Russian penal colonies.
For Putin, gaining leverage was the whole point of arresting Evan in the first place: he doesn’t need him and Whelan indefinitely imprisoned; he sees them as bargaining chips (another word might be hostages). So, even when relations between the U.S. and Russia are at their worst, most antagonistic level in decades, Putin is always ready to use his “exchange fund,” as it’s known in Russian, especially when he sees the chance to bring back Russian assets, many of whom, given Putin’s own background in the security services, occupy a privileged position in his view.
In recent months, Donald Trump had boasted that he was singularly capable of freeing Evan. In May, Trump said that Evan would be released “almost immediately” if he were elected President in the fall. In a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote, “Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, will do that for me, but not for anyone else, and WE WILL BE PAYING NOTHING!” Trump repeated the claim during his debate with Biden in June.
