It is the largest prisoner release deal since the end of the Cold War.. Russia and the West exchanged 26 of their nationals in Turkey on Thursday, August 1, who were taken from prisons in seven different countries. Sixteen of the people released were detained in Russia and Belarus. Moscow, for its part, obtained the return of ten people, including two children, imprisoned in the United States, Germany, Poland, Slovenia and Norway. The latter were welcomed on the Moscow tarmac by Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. This vast exchange was part of the “diplomatic feat”welcomed US President Joe Biden, even though one major prisoner was missing: the Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, who died in prison in February. Franceinfo presents those who benefited from this historic agreement.
On the Western side, journalists, a former Marine, an artist and opponents of the Kremlin
Journalist Evan Gershkovich. LAmerican reporter from Wall Street Journalaged 32, was the first Western journalist to be imprisoned in Russia for espionage since the Soviet era. Arrested while reporting in Yekaterinburg (Urals), he was accused of having collected information on a Russian tank factory on behalf of the CIA, which his newspaper and Washington have strongly denied. The 32-year-old, originally from New Jersey, near New York, comes from a Jewish family that left the USSR in the late 1970s. He was sentenced on July 19 to 16 years in prison in a summary trial behind closed doors. Wall Street Journal and the organization Reporters Without Borders have declared themselves “immensely relieved” of his release.
Former Marine Paul Whelan. The 54-year-old, who also has British, Irish and Canadian citizenship, had been imprisoned in Russia since December 2018. Director of international security for the American group BorgWarner, a manufacturer of spare parts in the automotive sector, he had been arrested by the Russian special services (FSB) in a hotel in central Moscow. The espionage charges, which he denies, earned him a 16-year prison sentence in June 2020.
Journalist Alsu Kurmasheva. The 47-year-old Russian-American reporter was living in Prague and working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty when she was arrested in Russia in October 2023 during a private trip. She had been sentenced on July 19 to six and a half years in prison for writing about the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
Allies of Alexei Navalny. An accountant in Ufa, western Russia, Lilia Chanysheva, 42, had left her job to join Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund in 2017, actively participating in the anti-corruption protest movement in her region. The opponent was arrested in November 2021 and sentenced to nine and a half years in prison for “extremism”. Another ally of Alexei Navalny, Ksenia Fadeyeva, 32, was elected in 2020 to the city council of Tomsk, Siberia, with other independent activists, a rare success for the Russian opposition at the time. After the ban in 2021 of Navalny’s movement, Ksenia Fadeyeva refused to go into exile abroad, despite the risks. She was sentenced in December 2023 to nine years in prison, also for “extremism”. Finally, Vadim Ostanine, 47, was sentenced to nine years in prison for “extremism” after heading Navalny’s team office in Biysk, Altai, in southern Russia.
Five German or Russian-German dual nationals detained. The German Rico Krieger is suspected of photographing military sites in Belarus in October 2023 on behalf of Ukrainian secret services and of having placed an explosive device on a railway line near Minsk under their orders. Sentenced to death on June 24 by a Minsk court for “terrorism” And “mercenary work” He was pardoned on Tuesday by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.Atrick Schoebel, a German tourist, was accused of drug trafficking after being arrested at the end of January at the airport in Saint Petersburg with cannabis chewing gum. German Moïjes, a Russian-German lawyer, was arrested at the end of May 2024 in Saint Petersburg and then charged with “high treason” and was awaiting trial. Finally, Dieter Voronin, a Russian-German political scientist, was sentenced in March 2023 to 13 years in prison for “high treason”.
Russian artist Alexandra Skotchilenko. The 33-year-old woman was arrested in Russia in April 2022 for replacing price labels in a supermarket with messages denouncing the offensive in Ukraine. She was sentenced to seven years in prison in November 2023.
Russian-British activist Vladimir Kara-Murza. A filmmaker and then a journalist, this 42-year-old man, committed to the defense of human rights and a fierce critic of the Kremlin, was sentenced in April 2023 to 25 years in prison for “treason” and dissemination of “fake news” on the conflict in Ukraine. According to several investigative media outlets, including Bellingcat and The MirrorRussian secret services were implicated in two poisonings he suffered in 2015 and 2017. He never fully recovered and suffers from a neuromuscular pathology. He was honored in May by the Pulitzer Prize jury, for “his passionate articles written at the risk of his life from his prison cell”.
Other opponents, particularly those against the war in Ukraine. An active activist in the liberal opposition in Russia since the 2000s, Ilya Yashin, 41, was sentenced in late 2022 in Russia to eight and a half years in prison for denouncing crimes attributed to Moscow in Ukraine, particularly in the Ukrainian city of Buchá. Oleg Orlov, 71, a figure in the defense of human rights, was also sentenced in late February to two and a half years in prison for repeated denunciations of the Russian offensive in Ukraine. His state of health in detention worried his relatives. Arrested in Russia in 2021, the Russian opponent Andrei Pivovarov, 42, was sentenced a year later to four years in prison for campaigning for a banned organisation, Otkritaya Rossia (Open Russia), linked to the exiled former oligarch and opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
On the Russian side, spies and hackers
FSB agent Vadim Krasikov convicted of murder. This man, accused of having been recruited by the FSB (the Russian secret service), was sentenced on December 15, 2021 in Berlin to life imprisonment for the murder of a Georgian from the Chechen minority, who had fought against Russian forces between 2000 and 2004. Faced with criticism sparked by his release, theGerman Chancellor Scholz responded that the decision had been “difficult” but that she had “save lives”The Russian presidential spokesman confirmed on Friday that it belongs to the FSB. “He served in Alfa”an elite unit of the FSB, “with several security service employees” Vladimir Putin, said Dmitry Peskov.
A couple of suspected spies and their children. These two alleged agents of the Russian foreign intelligence services had arrived in Slovenia in 2017 with Argentinian passports, under the names Ludwig Gisch and Maria Rosa Mayer Munos. They lived in the capital Ljubljana with their two children before their arrest in December 2022. A scenario worthy of the series The AmericansThey pleaded guilty and were sentenced on Wednesday by the Slovenian courts to more than a year and a half in prison for “espionage and falsification of documents”a sentence equivalent to the time already spent in detention. They were eventually able to return to Russian soil. The couple’s children were previously unaware that they were Russian and “don’t speak Russian”the Kremlin spokesman told reporters on Friday.
Three other men accused of espionage. Arrested by Polish intelligence near the Ukrainian border on February 28, 2022, Pavel Rubtsov had been accused of being a spy for Moscow. He also has Spanish nationality, under the name Pablo González, and worked as a journalist for the online media Público and the television channel La Sexta. Arrested in October 2022 by the Norwegian police, Mikhail Mikushin, pretended to be a Brazilian in his thirties named José Assis Giammaria – even though, according to Norwegian media, he does not speak Portuguese. The 46-year-old had been admitted the previous year as a researcher at the University of Tromsø, where he worked on Norway’s policy in the High North and hybrid threats. According to a researcher for the investigative website Bellingcat, he was in fact a colonel in Russian military intelligence. Arrested in Estonia, Russian Vadim Konechtchenok was extradited to the United States in July 2023. He was suspected by the American justice system of having links with the FSB and of having supplied the Russian defense sector with technologies and munitions from American companies.
Two hackers extradited to the United States. Arrested in 2014 in the Maldives and then transferred to the United States, hacker Roman Seleznev was sentenced in 2017 to 27 years in prison for bank card fraud, the damage of which was estimated by Washington at more than $169 million. Russian businessman Vladislav Kliouchine was arrested in Switzerland in 2021 and then extradited to the United States. He was sentenced there in September 2023 by a Boston court to nine years in prison for his participation in massive thefts of confidential computer data from American companies.