As darkness fell on Thursday, President Vladimir Putin received the Russian citizens who were part of the largest prisoner exchange with the West since the Cold War A very complicated months-long negotiation process ended and a powerful public relations campaign began in Russia, where the returnees were defined as patriots. The Eurasian country is trying to present itself as a nation open to dialogue, although later the cards are marked. “I want to thank you for your loyalty to your oath, to your duty and to the homeland, which has not forgotten you,” Putin told the group, which included the Russian-Spanish Pablo Gonzálezwho was accused in Poland of being an agent of Russian military intelligence, and the assassin-spy Vadim Krasikov, sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany for the murder of a Chechen exile, and who was received with a hug by the head of the Kremlin. Krasikov's return to Russia was Moscow's main goal in the exchange.
With the exchange, Russia not only freed and sent Americans, such as the journalist, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Evan Gershkovich, but also a large group of Russian political prisoners and dissidents – including the prominent Ilia Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza. With this move, the Kremlin is trying to send several messages. The first is that it is not abandoning its own country, as former President Dmitry Medvedev has reiterated. “Of course, I would like the Russian traitors to rot in prison… but it is more useful to get our own people out, those who worked for our country, for the Fatherland, for all of us,” he said in his Telegram channel.
Among those arriving in Moscow, greeted with a bouquet of flowers by the Kremlin chief, were Artem and Anna Dultsev, aka Maria and Luis, and their two young children. The couple, who had posed as Argentines for years, were convicted in Slovenia of espionage. The Dultsevs had created an intense cover-up (the kind of “illegal” or unregistered spies). They spoke to each other and to their children in Spanish, to the point that the children only discovered they were Russians on the plane that took them to Moscow, where Putin addressed them in Spanish. “Good evening,” he said to them, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov’s account.
The details emerging about the exchange show a very complex architecture, involving several Western countries, such as Poland, where González, also called Pavel Rubtsov, was imprisoned, or Slovenia, where the Dultsevs were arrested in 2022. Intelligence sources European women talk about many months of work and how Russia has stepped up its policy of detaining Western citizens to encourage a possible exchange.
Russia has a long-standing policy of taking hostages and exchanging them for its own assets held abroad. In the Eurasian country, espionage and hybrid warfare activities (such as cyberattacks) fall within its defense doctrine and are a source of pride. Putin was a spy for the Soviet KGB secret service and head of its successor, the FSB, and has always praised those who served as agents as “patriots,” especially in the West. Those who are exchanged will be decorated, the Kremlin chief announced.
The flattering packaging with which Russia is welcoming the returned prisoners also comes at a time when the Kremlin is trying to rebuild its network of spies abroad, after the hard blow to deportations suffered following Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
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American coordination
The United States, which tried to get Gershkovich back, was arrested in March 2023. accused and convicted of espionagejournalist Alsou Kurmasheva, arrested in October last year, and former Marine Paul Whelan, convicted in 2020coordinated talks with European countries and negotiated with the Kremlin through diplomatic channels and secret meetings in several Middle Eastern countries.
Germany, and in particular Chancellor Olaf Scholz, played a substantial role in the deal. Putin has shown enormous interest in bringing back the spy hitman Krasikov, who was arrested in 2019 murdered a prominent Chechen refugee in a Berlin park associated with the opposition. So much so that there is speculation that the head of the Kremlin coincided with him during his stay in St. Petersburg.
In November last year, shortly after Kurmasheva's arrestwho works for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Washington offered Moscow four names for a possible exchange: the Dultsevs, González and another Russian military intelligence (GRU) officer posing as a Brazilian (alias José) in Norway, where he had been imprisoned.
The exchange was of no use to the Kremlin. It wanted more, and above all, Krasikov. Meanwhile, the team of captured Russian opponent Alexei Navalny was on the move so that he too could be part of the exchange. Bulgarian journalist Christo Grozev, who has been on a crusade for years to expose Russian spies (he was the one who identified Krasikov) and who was very close to the dissident, began to exert pressure and put other names of Russians who were open to the exchange on the table.
In the Kremlin, where they speak of the “collective West”, they were open to a combined exchange of different countries. And even more so since Iran in 2023 exchanged a Dane, two Austrians and a Belgian for an Iranian imprisoned in Belgium, a source from Moscow says.
Meanwhile, in Russia, the situation of the prisoners was deteriorating. Navalny’s too. And Gershkovich’s mother, who, as the WSJ tells us, has been key to getting the Western bureaucratic machinery moving, started pushing. He spoke personally to Biden, who promised to talk to Scholz about adding the spy-hitman to the exchange package, even though there could be a significant political price to pay for letting him go in that exchange.
Scholz to Biden: “I'll do it for you”
The political negotiations were complex. “I will do it for you,” the German finally told the American president. Germany would also receive two of its citizens. Scholz was also deeply concerned about the help in the liberation of Navalny. arrested in Moscow in January 2021on his return from Germany, where he was recovering from a near-fatal poisoning by the Kremlin.
But last February, when everything seemed to be going well, Navalny died under strange circumstances in the high-security Arctic prison where he had been sent. Everything was frozen for weeks. Until Russian dissidents and activists were added to the list, such as Yashin, Kara-Murza, Andrei Pivovarov, who did not really want to leave Russia but rather wanted to fight from within. Others, such as the artist Sasha Skochilenko, were arrested for changing price tags in supermarkets to reflect messages against the war in Ukraine and sentenced to seven years in prison.
The group, which Russia considers traitors and who were held in terrible conditions in penal colonies established by the Eurasian country, arrived in Germany on Thursday night. “I was sure he would die in prison,” Kara-Murza admitted after his release, during a phone call with his family, who were with Biden in the White House. He had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for high treason and criticizing the Russian military for his messages against Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The Kremlin still holds Western prisoners and hundreds of Russian political prisoners. “The country has not abandoned its hostage policy, but is now interested in showing some openness,” a senior European source said.
The second message that Moscow is sending across the lines – which Western sources are very suspicious of – is that there is room for negotiation. This is a particularly important element in light of Ukraine, where Putin’s large-scale invasion is already two and a half years old, and is aimed primarily at these countries (not only in Europe and the United States, but also the so-called Global South) are tired of the war and support for Kiev and are demanding a ceasefire.
“Raising doubts in the West about the value of continuing to support Ukraine could be victory enough, even if the Kremlin is taking a risk,” said Sam Greene of the Centre for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), in an analysis on social networks.
The exchange does not mean that Russia and the “collective West” are ready for broader agreements, argues Russian political scientist Andrei Koleshnikov. But the choreography of how it happened and when is very revealing about the Kremlin’s backroom dealings and its ways of doing things. Also about the fear and uncertainty about the coming months in the West. The proximity of the US elections and the fear that Republican Donald Trump, who is seen as close to the Kremlin, would return to the White House, hastened the agreement.
Not just from the United States, but also from Germany, says analyst Tatiana Stanovaya. Scholz agreed for Biden – and because he helped free a dozen Russian dissidents – but it seems unlikely that he would do so for Trump, the analyst says.
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