American Wall Street Journal Reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan were released from prison in Russia on Thursday as part of a prisoner swap, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The pair were released after days of intense speculation that Russian President Vladimir Putin was preparing to free high-profile prisoners, though it remained unclear exactly who would be released — and who the Kremlin would want in return. Full details of the deal to free Gershkovich and Whelan were not immediately available.
Putin prepares to swap US prisoners for Russian assassin
Gershkovich's release comes a month after he was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum-security penal colony on charges of espionage.
He was arrested in March 2023 by Russia's FSB security service during a reporting trip to the eastern city of Yekaterinburg and accused of collecting secret information about a Russian tank factory on behalf of the CIA. log and the Biden administration strongly denied the allegations and accused Russia of conducting a sham trial.
Whelan, meanwhile, was arrested in Moscow in 2018 and sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2020 on disputed espionage charges. He played a role in the last U.S. prisoner swap with Russia, in December 2022, which saw WNBA star Brittney Griner swapped for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
At the time, U.S. officials said Russia would not consider including Whelan in the deal. President Joe Biden said Moscow was treating his case differently from Griner's “for completely illegitimate reasons,” but nevertheless vowed to “never give up” on bringing Whelan home.
Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist involved in negotiations for the new swap deal, told The Daily Beast on Wednesday that the agreement was “bittersweet.” On the one hand, he said, the deal freed people “languishing in Russian prisons on insane charges,” while at the same time rewarding Putin’s belief that “as long as he accumulates ‘barter capital,’ he will always be able to get his killers, hackers and spies back.”
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