have heard illegally detained wsj reporter evan gershkovich was released by russia in prisoner exchange and flying to nyc tomorrow.
— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) August 1, 2024
most excellent news if true.
BREAKING: Russia is releasing Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former US Marine Paul Whelan as part of a major prisoner swap with the US, according to people familiar with the situation. @Bloomberg
— Lara Seligman (@laraseligman) August 1, 2024
We should throw in Kamala, Swalwell, Schumer, Pelosi, Tliab, Omar....doubledog said:
Can we send some of our Marxists to Putin. Let's start with Warren, Bernie and Harris.
They really should. We keep asking "why doesn't Gaza just surrender?" Same could be said of Ukraine.Irish 2.0 said:
Makes me think that the Ukraine/Russia conflict may be coming to a close and that Ukraine is giving up the lost land.
Krasikov is a contract murderer, and more relevant than the Merchant of Death at the time of his release. The optics on Bart for Merchant were flashy on both sides, but neither had any geopolitical significance.Dirt 05 said:
Russians must really want that group back - we actually seem to be coming out ahead on this one. The last notable trade was literally Merchant of Death for pot smoking basketball player.
Evan Gershkovich, Alsu Kurmasheva, Paul Whelan. Free. Amazing. #IStandWithEvan pic.twitter.com/mGtNjTwedB
— Paul Beckett (@paulwsj) August 1, 2024
Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan, Alsu Kurmasheva and Vladimir Kara-Murza are among the prisoners freed from Russian captivity.
— Daphne Tolis (@daphnetoli) August 1, 2024
In exchange, Russia received 8 prisoners held by the U.S., Germany, Poland, Slovenia and Norway. pic.twitter.com/7XbfY5PeGx
One of the prisoners released back to Russia was a hitman. Not sure which country he was being held in though.oh no said:
did we have some more Merchants of Death to hand over?
Germany.Irish 2.0 said:One of the prisoners released back to Russia was a hitman. Not sure which country he was being held in though.oh no said:
did we have some more Merchants of Death to hand over?
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Krasikov, a high-ranking officer in the Russian secret service the FSB, was serving a life sentence in a German jail for the 2019 murder of an opponent of the Russian regime in a central Berlin park.
Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Georgian-born Chechen dissident registered as an asylum seeker in Germany, was shot dead in broad daylight by Krasikov. The assassin had entered Germany using false papers.
Sentencing Krasikov in 2021, the Berlin court called the killing "state-ordered murder", a claim that Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, and the Kremlin denied.
The assassination sparked a diplomatic crisis involving the expulsion of two Russian envoys from the German capital.
Irish 2.0 said:One of the prisoners released back to Russia was a hitman. Not sure which country he was being held in though.oh no said:
did we have some more Merchants of Death to hand over?
After enduring unimaginable suffering and uncertainty, the Americans detained in Russia are safe, free, and have begun their journeys back into the arms of their families. pic.twitter.com/1rYNBTt9tJ
— President Biden (@POTUS) August 1, 2024
He was the only person Putin gave a crap about in this entire exchange. It seems he may have collected the WSJ reporter in direct hopes of getting his hitman back.Aggie1205 said:
Germans had him.
Photos online make it look like a "private" jet. The U.S. government owns numerous such jets for diplomatic purposes, and I imagine it was one of those.techno-ag said:
Anybody catch what type of plane flew the three into Andrews tonight? They said a private jet. Just curious.
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this time, the CIA had something new to offer: Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin who'd been convicted of executing a man in broad daylight in Berlin and was serving a life sentence in a German prison.
The proposal the CIA offered to the Russians that day was the culmination of months of work by US officials to convince the Germans to release Krasikov, who's seen as having close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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Key to the deal was President Biden's ability to persuade German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to release Krasikov, the Russian prisoner most keenly sought by Putin.
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The Biden administration had already traded its most valuable Russian prisoner, convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout, in return for Griner's release. That left them with no high value Russian spies in custody, so officials began to scour the globe for Russian detainees.
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In November of that year, CIA officers in Moscow proposed an offer to swap four Russian prisoners held by Norway, Poland and Slovenia in exchange for Whelan and Gershkovich.
But when Russia rejected the offer, it became clear to the US side that Russia wanted Krasikov. No one else would do.
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In the Oval Office meeting, according to a senior administration official, "Chancellor Scholz responded to the President, saying, 'For you, I will do this.'"
"The president then turned to Jake and said, 'Get it done,'" the official said.
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But then there was another blow: On February 16, 2024, Navalny died in a Russian prison. The US had been working to include Navalny in the deal. "Everything cooled," after Navalny died, said one US official familiar with the talks.
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The list was finalized in late March, according to the US official. President Biden sent a letter to Scholz in April, and the Germans at last agreed to release Krasikov in early June. The key, according to multiple US officials, was the inclusion of Kara-Murza and seven other Russian political prisoners.
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It wasn't only Germany that the US had to get on board. Still in Munich, Harris also asked for a meeting with Prime Minster Robert Golob of Slovenia. The main purpose of that meeting, a White House official said, was to press the prime minister on moving forward with the release of the two Russian nationals that were in Slovenian custody that the US had also identified as being a top priority for the Russians.
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It was only in recent weeks that Moscow agreed to the deal on the table. Once they gave their approval, things began to move quickly.
Gershkovich's trial largely condemned as a sham was expedited to July, with a quick conviction on the charges of espionage and a sentencing of 16 years in Russian prison. Kurmasheva's trial was also quietly accelerated, and she was sentenced to 6.5 years in prison. In past prisoner swaps, the Russians had wanted convictions before they would move forward on any deal.
Krasikov.MouthBQ98 said:
Yeah, Putin wanted some particular person back pretty badly and we found a way to make that happen or we gave up something under the table that helps Russia in the war.
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Five thousand miles away, Evan Gershkovich was in his final hours in Russia's custody, aboard a Tupolev-204 government jet bound for a Turkish airport where orange-vested security personnel were waiting nervously.
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They ranged from hardened dissidents who had braved poisoning and hunger strikes to ordinary Americans who found themselves reduced to bargaining chips in a yearslong geopolitical tug of war with Vladimir Putin.
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The price for their freedom was being flown in handcuffs and a bulletproof helmet from Germany on a Gulfstream jet, landing near the Turkish VIP terminal where Russia would collect him. Vadim Krasikov was a professional hit man who had gunned down an exile in broad daylight in a Berlin park.
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At the center of the struggle were the U.S. and Germany, two allies grappling with the moral and strategic calculus of freeing guilty prisoners to bring their innocent citizens home.
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Somehow along the way, a mother living in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia found herself stuck between the two most powerful governments in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance, ferrying messages that she hoped could free her son.
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Journal reporters were also, unavoidably, part of the story, followed through the streets of Vienna and Washington and, in one case, summoned for questioning by Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB. Reporters crisscrossed Western capitals, sitting with intelligence officials who insisted that no electronic devices be brought into the meetings and in some cases, communicating through handwritten notes to avoid leaving a data trail.
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But as the war in Ukraine unfolded, officials turned hostile, friends fled, and sources he had known were being jailed. Unidentified men had followed him through the streets as he churned out front-page scoops that challenged the Kremlin's official narrative of the Ukraine invasion.
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The mustachioed head of the First Service of Russia's FSB security agency, Gen. Vladislav Menschikov, was briefing the president on Gershkovich's arrest, down to the minor details.
Menschikov had once been in charge of Putin's nuclear bunkers, but now ran the sprawling FSB division that included the Department for Counter Intelligence Operations, or DKRO, a secretive unit that surveilled Americans
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Since 2021, Putin had been pushing his national security council officials on secure video calls to bring back the aging veteran of the Soviet-Afghan war. The two of them had been so close that they visited a gun range together. Putin "shoots well," Krasikov had told his family.
The president seemed so loyal to the twice-married father of three that Western intelligence officials speculated that he had been Putin's personal bodyguard
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Russia's president was convinced otherwise. A young Putin had served in Dresden with the KGB, when West Germany was still an American satellite. Now at the pinnacle of his power, he had never reconciled himself to the notion that unified Germany, Europe's powerhouse, couldn't be swayed by U.S. pressure.
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Pulling out a cocktail napkin, the journalist jotted Carstens a two-column list of Russian prisoners who the U.S. could trade for Gershkovich and Whelan, the incarcerated Marine. But these low-ranking Russian nobodies would be decorative adornments tacked onto the big ticket exchange that Grozev had been championing for a year.
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The reporter was spending 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in a 9-foot-by-12 foot cell in the infamous jail where Stalin's henchman once tortured thousands of enemies of the state.
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Yet so far, more Americans were vanishing into Russian jails than coming home. In June, Russia took two more U.S. citizens, including another journalist, Alsu Kurmasheva, an editor at Radio Free Europe
^^LOL, this is funny.Quote:
The problem was, the U.S. penitentiary system was holding very few Russians the Kremlin might conceivably want. At one point, Carstens's staff, scrounging for stock to trade, became so desperate that they haphazardly searched for Russian names on PACER, a publicly-available database of federal court records.
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Germany's foreign minister Baerbock worried freeing Krasikov would invite Putin and every autocrat who admired him to snatch more hostagesbut Blinken was speaking to her at length to persuade her of the moral logic.
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That same day, Scholz and Biden spoke by phone about a meeting, to discuss the matter, in the White House. By Feb. 2, the train was in motion.
"For you, I will do this," Scholz told Biden.
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Just as Berlin and Washington outlined how a deal would work, Moscow was dealing with an unexpected new interlocutor, Tucker Carlson.
The former Fox News host was hammering out terms for an interview with Putin for his new straight-to-social-media talk show. Carlson told the president's aides that he planned to request Putin free Gershkovich on the spot, during the interview. If all went well, he would take Evan home on his flight. An official close to Putin told the TV host it would be a "great idea" and could generate a positive response.
Near the end of his two-hour conversation, Carlson pushed his point: "This guy is obviously not a spy, he's just a kid."
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After the interview, as Putin led Carlson on a tour of the Kremlin that stretched near midnight, the TV commentator returned their conversation to Gershkovich: "Why are you doing this?…It's hurting you."
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"Unfortunately, whatever happened, happened," Putin would later say, publicly uttering the name Navalny for the first time, and calling his chief opponent's death a regrettable incident of the sort that also occurs in American prisons.
"It's life."
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The final deal coming together was unprecedented in its scale and complexity. It included Gershkovich and Krasikov, but also two other jailed journalists, Russian political prisoners, four Germans and the deep cover spies from Slovenia, Norway and Poland. The CIA director flew to Ankara, the site of the exchange, to discuss the logistics with Turkey's spy chief. The agreement with Russia was fragile and one errant leak could blow the whole thing up.
