Washington receives 16 people, including a journalist from WSJ // Moscow, eight of its citizens, including FSB agent Krasikov
▲ In the above graphic, Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) greeted the pardoned individuals at the airport outside Moscow. Above, President Joe Biden (right) and Vice President Kamala Harris at Andrews Joint Air Force Base in Maryland, upon the arrival of the pardoned individuals.Photo courtesy of the Kremlin via AP and AFP
Juan Pablo Duch
Correspondent
The newspaper La Jornada
Friday, August 2, 2024, p. 27
Moscow. Long prepared in the strictest confidence by Kremlin and White House negotiators, with the mediation of Turkey, the largest prisoner exchange since the days of the Cold War finally took place at Ankara airport on Thursday. cold War.
The unusual exchange, at one of the most tense moments between Russia and the United States and its allies, allowed Moscow to obtain the freedom of eight of its citizens imprisoned in the United States, Germany, Norway, Poland and Slovenia, while the West received 11 Russians and five Germans imprisoned in Russia (one of them in Belarus).
In the evening, according to a local television report, President Vladimir Putin went to the official Vnukovo-2 airport to meet the plane that brought his fellow citizens who were in prison to Moscow, to thank them. his loyalty to Russia and tell them that The country did not forget them for a single minute.. Putin announced that he is going to decorate them.
In the United States, President Joe Biden highlighted how diplomatic feat the negotiation that led to the exchange. Some of these women and men have been unjustly detained for years. They have all endured unimaginable suffering and uncertainty. Today (yesterday), their agony is over.Biden was quoted as saying by news agencies. He thanked his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for his efforts to ensure that the exchange of prisoners will be completed without any setbacks
They get key pieces
The outcome of this game of chance, in which the pieces to be exchanged ended up behind bars for real crimes or crimes invented out of necessity, satisfied the main players: Russia and the United States, who got what they wanted more than anything – Moscow to bring back the agent of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB, Federal Security Service, successor of the Soviet KGB) imprisoned in Germany, and Washington, the three Americans convicted in Russia – although there are still many prisoners from both countries who could be part of future exchanges.
Washington was able to free Evan Gershkovich, correspondent The Wall Street Journal; Alsu Kur-masheva, editor of the Tatarstan and Bashkiria version of the White House-funded Radio Liberty, and Paul Whelan, former marinethey were convicted of espionage and she for spreading fake news about the Russian army.
Washington also obtained the release of three of the main Russian opposition figures, Vladimir Kara-Murza, accused of extremism and high treason, holder of a US green card, as well as Ilia Yashin, one of the Russian president’s greatest critics, and Oleg Orlov, co-director of the non-governmental organization Memorial for Human Rights, imprisoned for spreading fake news on the military operation in Ukraine.
Five other Russian Kremlin opponents also benefited from the pact: Ksenia Fadeyeva, Lilia Chanysheva and Vadim Ostanin, considered extremists for heading regional offices of the Anti-Corruption Fund of the late Aleksei Navalny, who died in prison in February this year; Andrei Pivovarov, director of Open Russia, classified as undesirable organizationas well as Sasha Skochilenko, a musician and poet whose crime was distributing anti-war leaflets in a supermarket.
Three Russian-Germans were also released from prison: Demuri Voronin (Dieter Woronin, according to his passport), a political scientist; Kevin Lik, a 19-year-old activist; and German Moishes, a lawyer, all charged with high treason. And two German citizens: Patrick Shebel, arrested in St. Petersburg for drug possession, and the mercenary Rico Krieger, sentenced to death in Belarus for terrorism and pardoned by President Aleksandr Lukashenko.
Moishes and Shebel had not yet been sentenced and Krieger was not in Russia, so Putin, according to the Kremlin press service, signed only 13 pardons.
In exchange for these five Germans, Washington managed to convince Berlin to release Vadim Krasikov, an FSB agent sentenced to life imprisonment for killing Zelimjan Jangoshvili, a former commander of the Chechen separatists, in a park in the German capital. Interviewed by Tucker Carlson last February, Putin described Krasikov as a patriot.
For the Russian cause
The other Russians exchanged are Anna and Artiom Dultsev, who lived in Slovenia and confessed to being spies under false identities as Argentines (they traveled to Moscow with their two underage children); Mikhail Mikushin, an academic at the University of Tromso in Norway who posed as a Brazilian and admitted to working for a Russian intelligence agency; and Pablo Gonzalez (Pavel Rubtsov, according to his Russian passport), a Russian-born Spanish journalist held in Poland without charge on suspicion of allegedly spying for Russia’s military intelligence directorate.
As part of the agreement, Roman Selezniov, the son of a federal State Duma deputy and hacker, was released from US prisons. He was arrested in the Maldives and convicted in the United States for stealing $169 million from people and institutions in that country; Vladislav Kliushin, an apparent former Russian military intelligence agent, sentenced for crimes related to new technologies; and Vadim Konoschenok, arrested in Estonia and extradited to the United States for acquiring equipment and electronic components for the Russian military industry.
As if it were a thriller that was being filmed in real time, in recent days multiple indications have accumulated that a major prisoner exchange was underway, without any of the parties involved confirming or denying it.
First, the almost simultaneous disappearance of the Russians held in different penitentiary centers, without their lawyers being able to find out where their clients were, which created anguish in their respective families.
The almost hidden process
Experts then began to detect strange flights by official aircraft linked to the FSB to cities near the places of detention of the now participants in the exchange, while the three Russians who were imprisoned in the United States stopped appearing in the public database of the US prison system.
Yesterday, it was surprising that the texts of several decrees signed by Putin were not published, mentioning only their numbers, which turned out to be those of the pardons.
Once the exchange was confirmed, Russian television, when reporting the news, limited itself to a brief statement from the FSB, where it reported that Eight Russian citizens arrested and imprisoned in various NATO countries have returned home and? Russian citizens were exchanged with a group of individuals acting in the interests of foreign states and to the detriment of Russia’s security..