Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been freed as part of the biggest prisoner swap between Russia and the West since the Cold War.
Paul Whelan, a former US marine, as well as prominent Russian opposition politicians and activists who had been jailed for criticising the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, were also among the 16 people released by Russia.
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Evan Gershkovich among 26 freed in major Russia-West prisoner exchange
‘Their brutal ordeal is over’: Biden praises prisoners freed from Russia
How the world reacted to Russia-West prisoner swap
Russia’s FSB releases video of moment prisoners are freed in swap
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Most prominent of those heading back to Moscow was Vadim Krasikov, who was serving a life sentence in Germany for the assassination of a former Chechen rebel commander in a Berlin park.
Below is a round-up of all those freed.
Freed by Russia
Lilia Chanysheva
Chanysheva, who once headed late opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s offices in the central Bashkortostan republic, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison in June 2023 for having created an “extremist organisation”, a sentence that was increased to nine and a half years in April.
An accountant, the 42-year-old had worked for major companies including Deloitte before joining Navalny’s team in 2017, openly protesting corruption in the region.
Ksenia Fadeyeva
Fadeyeva led Navalny’s now-banned organisation in the Siberian city of Tomsk, where the opposition leader was poisoned in August 2020, and was sentenced to nine years in prison in December 2023 for “extremism”.
The 32-year-oldwas elected to the Tomsk city legislature in 2020, a move hailed as a victory for the Russian opposition in the struggle against Putin’s rule.
Evan Gershkovich
The 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter was arrested in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg in March 2023 and accused of spying for the CIA.
Russia alleged Gershkovich had been caught “red-handed” spying on a factory in the Urals that was making tanks for use in Ukraine, but presented no evidence to support its claims. The Wall Street Journal denied the charges. The US designated the journalist “wrongfully detained”, meaning it considered the case politically motivated.
Gershkovich was convicted on July 19 and sentenced to 16 years in jail after a three-day trial that was closed to the media on grounds of state secrecy.
Vladimir Kara-Murza
Kara-Murza, a staunch critic of the Kremlin, was serving a 25-year jail term for condemning Moscow’s campaign in Ukraine, one of the harshest sentences ever handed to a Putin critic.
A dual British-Russian national, the 42-year-old was arrested in April 2022 after a speech in the US where he accused Russia of “war crimes” against Ukraine.
In May, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize “for passionate columns written at great personal risk from his prison cell” that were published in The Washington Post. He suffers from a nerve condition after surviving two poisoning attempts in the 2010s.
We are overjoyed that Vladimir Kara-Murza has been released as part of a prisoner swap. He is an extraordinarily brave and principled man, who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for his columns from the gulag.
He and his family have been through so much, simply because he told the… pic.twitter.com/ebMuOiUexV— James Jones (@jamesjonesfilm) August 1, 2024
Alsu Kurmasheva
US-Russian journalist Kurmasheva, 47, was sentenced to six years and six months on July 19 – the same day as Gershkovich – in an ultra-secret trial, which was not reported until days later.
An editor with the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty outlet, she was accused of violating Russia’s strict military censorship laws and arrested while travelling to Russia from her home in Prague to see her sick mother. RFE/RL called her case a “mockery of justice”.
Kevin Lik
Lik, who was arrested when he was 17 and is a dual Russian-German citizen, became the youngest person ever convicted of treason in Russia when he was sentenced in 2023 to four years for allegedly sending photos of a Russian military facility visible from his apartment window to German security services.
German Moyzhes
Moyzhes, another Russian-German dual national, was facing treason charges after he was arrested in Saint Petersburg in May, according to Russian state media.
Almost no details of the case against him had been made public. Moyzhes, an immigration lawyer, was well known in Saint Petersburg as an urban activist and pro-cycle campaigner.
Oleg Orlov
The veteran activist and key figure in Memorial, the Nobel Prize-winning and now-banned human rights organisation, was jailed for two and a half years in February after calling Russia a “fascist” state and criticising its invasion of Ukraine.
Memorial said the 71-year-old Orlov’s trial was “a mockery of justice and an attack on the fundamental right to free expression”.
Vadim Ostanin
The former head of another of Navalny’s regional branches, Ostanin was sentenced in 2023 to nine years in prison for participating in an “extremist” organisation.
⚡️ Oleg Orlov is free!
We demand the release of all other political prisoners in Russia and Belarus.
Russian human rights defender and co-founder of Memorial, Oleg Orlov was released from prison and transferred to Köln (Germany) today, in a historic political prisoner swap.… pic.twitter.com/Q2XWqenTxj
— Memorial in English (@EnMemorial) August 1, 2024
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Andrei Pivovarov
Pivovarov, a Russian opposition activist, headed the pro-democracy Open Russia foundation, which was funded by exiled former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who himself spent a decade in prison for campaigning against Putin.
Pivovarov was forcibly removed from a plane by Russian intelligence agents before he could leave the country, and sentenced to four years in a penal colony in July 2022 for collaborating with an “undesirable” organisation.
Patrick Schoebel
A German citizen, Schoebel was arrested earlier this year at Saint Petersburg airport after customs officials found cannabis gummy bears in his luggage.
Alexandra Skochilenko
An artist, Alexandra Skochilenko was jailed for seven years in November 2023 after she was convicted of spreading “false information” by replacing five supermarket price tags with messages criticising Russia’s war in Ukraine. Better known as Sasha, the 33-year-old from Saint Petersburg, was arrested in April 2022 after an elderly customer at the supermarket found the messages and notified the police.
Dieter Voronin
A dual 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.
Paul Whelan
A former US marine with US, British, Irish and Canadian citizenship, Whelan was arrested in a Moscow hotel in 2018, allegedly with a cache of classified documents, when he was the security director of a US car parts manufacturer.
Like Gershkovich, 54-year-old Whelan strongly denied the charges against him and was designated by the US as “wrongfully detained”.
Ilya Yashin
Yashin, 41, was jailed for eight and a half years in December 2022, on charges of spreading “false information” about the Russian army after he condemned the “murders of civilians” in the Ukrainian town of Bucha earlier that year.
Yashin rose to prominence in a wave of anti-Kremlin protests in 2011-12 and was a longtime friend and ally of Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony in February, as well as Boris Nemtsov who was assassinated in Moscow in 2015.
Yashin was elected head of a Moscow district council in 2017 but was repeatedly blocked from standing for higher office. He was also branded a “foreign agent” by the Russian government.
Freed by Belarus
Rico Krieger
Belarus sentenced Krieger, a 30-year-old German national, to death in June after accusing him of photographing military sites and placing an explosive device on a railway line near Minsk on the orders of Ukraine.
On Tuesday, President Alexander Lukashenko, a top ally of Putin, announced Krieger had been pardoned.
Freed by the United States, Germany, Slovenia, Poland and Norway
Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva
Dultsev and Dultseva, both 40, were arrested in Slovenia in 2022 and sentenced to more than a year and a half in prison this week after being found guilty of spying in a trial that was closed to the public.
The couple had settled in the capital Ljubljana in 2017 using Argentinian passports. Authorities said they were Russian agents who travelled to neighbouring countries – members of NATO and the European Union, to pass on orders from Moscow and provide cash to other sleeper agents. Their two children, who attended an international school in Ljubljana, were also included in the swap.
Vladislav Klyushin
The United States sentenced Klyushin, 42, in September 2023 to nine years in prison for what it described as an “elaborate hack-to-trade scheme” that involved hacking into company systems to steal confidential information that was then used to trade securities, netting some $93m.
Vadim Konoshchenok
Konoshchenok was extradited to the US last year after he was arrested in Estonia on charges of attempting to procure US military equipment for Russia for the war in Ukraine. Washington alleges the 48-year-old has “ties to Russia’s FSB”.
Vadim Krasikov
Krasikov, 58, is an alleged hitman for Russia’s FSB, who was jailed for life over the murder in a Berlin park of exiled Chechen-Georgian dissident Zelimkhan “Tornike” Khangoshvili after he was shot dead at close range in broad daylight on August 23, 2019.
A German judge accused Russia of state terrorism, saying the order to kill must have come from President Vladimir Putin himself.
Moscow has rejected that interpretation, but in aFebruary interview with US journalist Tucker Carlson, Putin hinted that Krasikov was the Russian prisoner he most wanted in exchange for Gershkovich, referring to a person who “due to patriotic sentiments, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals”.
Mikhail Mikushin
Mikushin was arrested in Norway in 2022 and was accused of posing as a Brazilian researcher at a university in the northern city of Tromso.
Bellingcat, an investigative media outlet, said he was really a colonel in Russia’s GRU military intelligence services while Norwegian media reported that he could not speak Portuguese, Brazil’s national language.
Pavel Rubtsov
Rubtsov, who was born in Russia but moved to Spain with his mother as a nine-year-old, was arrested in Poland just four days after Moscow began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Poland alleged that Rubtsov, whose Spanish name is Pablo Gonzalez, was an agent for Russia’s GRU military intelligence service and was working undercover as a journalist.
Roman Seleznev
Seleznev, another Russian hacker, was arrested in the Maldives in 2014.
He was found guilty in the US of a cyber attack on thousands of US businesses that involved hacking into card payment terminals to steal credit card details, resulting in losses of $169m, and was jailed for 27 years in 2017.
That same year, Seleznev, the son of a Russian lawmaker, also pleaded guilty to participating in a racketeering scheme in Nevada and conspiracy to commit bank fraud in Georgia. He was given additional jail terms of 14 years each, to run concurrently with the earlier sentence.
