Russia has released an American journalist Ivan Gershkovich and a former US Marine Paul Whalen as part of a prisoner exchange deal involving several countries. In return, 26 prisoners were released on Thursday. Apart from this, two Russian prisoners accused of espionage were also released. According to news agency Reuters, this prisoner deal is the largest exchange between Russia and America in the post-Soviet history. This deal took place in Türkiye’s capital Ankara.
Apart from the US and Russia, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway and Belarus were also part of the swap deal. According to Turkish officials, 10 prisoners, including two minors, were taken to Russia, 13 to Germany and three to the United States. Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter in Russia, was arrested on charges of espionage in March 2023. The US government had denied this. He was later sentenced to 16 years in a high-security Russian prison.
The Wall Street Journal said in a statement that he was facing ‘a false and baseless charge’. President Joe Biden called Gershkovich’s detention ‘completely illegal’.
Whalen, a former Marine from Michigan who worked as a corporate security executive, was detained in Moscow in 2018 and convicted on espionage charges. He was serving a 16-year sentence in a Russian prison. Whalen and the US government have denied that he is a spy. America declared him ‘wrongfully detained’.
Thursday’s swap also included Vadim Kasikov, a colonel in the Russian FSB security service who was serving a life sentence in Germany for the murder of an exiled Chechen-Georgian dissident in a Berlin park. President Vladimir Putin had earlier expressed his desire to send him back to Russia.
Slovenia releases two Russian prisoners convicted of espionage
Two Russian prisoners convicted by Slovenia’s espionage court were among more than two dozen who were released on Thursday (August 1) in the largest prisoner swap since the Cold War. Artem Viktorovich Dultsev and Anna Valerievna Dultseva were sentenced to one year and seven months in prison in a secret trial on Wednesday (July 31). He was convicted on charges of espionage and using fake identity.