The prisoner exchange between Russia and the United States, which is imminent according to American media on Thursday, is part of a long history of reciprocal releases of detainees between Moscow and the West.
Reminder of the main exchanges that took place from the Cold War onwards.
December 2022: Basketball player Brittney Griner
American basketball star Brittney Griner, sentenced in August 2022 to nine years in prison for bringing an e-liquid containing cannabis to Russia, where she was due to play for a few months, was exchanged four months later at Abu Dhabi airport for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was serving a 25-year prison sentence in the United States.
A few days later, a major prisoner swap between Ukraine and Russia also involved a U.S. citizen, Suedi Murekezi, who was arrested in June 2022 in eastern Ukraine by Russian forces and charged with “participating in pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian protests.”
April 2022: ex-Marine Trevor Reed
In April 2022, former Marine Trevor Reed, sentenced to nine years in prison in Russia for violence, was exchanged with a Russian pilot, Konstantin Yaroshenko, imprisoned in the United States since 2010 for drug trafficking in connection with the Colombian FARC guerrillas. The operation took place at an airport in Turkey.
Mr Reed, who is in his thirties and was convicted of drunkenly assaulting two police officers, which he denied, denounced a “political” case. He had gone on hunger strike in November 2021 to protest his detention conditions.
2010: Historic exchange in Vienna
On July 9, 2010, Vienna-Schwechat Airport was the scene of the largest spy exchange since the fall of the Iron Curtain.
An official Russian plane lands on the tarmac, joined a few moments later by an American aircraft. A black minibus with tinted windows quickly shuttles between the two aircraft, which take off again without delay.
On board one were ten Russian agents expelled from the United States, including young Anna Chapman, a Russian businesswoman based in New York who collected information on behalf of Moscow as part of a network of “illegal agents.” Her double life fascinated the media.
In the other, four Russians arrived from Moscow, three of whom had been convicted of spying for Western countries. Among them was a certain Sergei Skripal, whose poisoning in 2018 in the south of England, where he had taken refuge, would trigger a major diplomatic crisis with Russia.
Several Western countries have accused Moscow of being behind the attempted assassination of the former double agent, something the Kremlin has always denied.
During the Cold War, the Bridge of Spies
Until the end of the Cold War in 1991, prisoner exchanges – especially of spies – were frequent between Moscow and the West. Those between the Americans and the Soviets took place in particular on the iron Glienicke Bridge, which connected the American zone of West Berlin to the East German city of Potsdam, spanning a river, the Havel.
Its legend began to be written in 1962, when the pilot of an American spy plane shot down over the USSR, Francis Gary Powers, was exchanged for a KGB colonel, Rudolf Abel, detained in the United States for espionage. The story was brought to the screen in 2015 by Steven Spielberg in “Bridge of Spies”.
In June 1985, on this same bridge, what one American official described as “the largest spy swap ever” took place: four Eastern Europeans held in the United States for espionage were exchanged for 25 agents (and their families) working for Western countries and held in Poland and East Germany.
But the most resounding operation to take place on this bridge was, on February 11, 1986, an exchange of agents from which the Soviet dissident Nathan Shcharansky, convicted in 1977 for treason and espionage and released after years in the gulag, took advantage.