A US reporter, former Marine and Russian-American journalist have been pictured after being released in a prisoner swap that has also let one of Vladimir Putin’s top enemies out of jail.
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, ex-US marine Paul Whelan and radio journalist Alsu Kurmasheva held an American flag and smiled and appeared in good spirits in the photo released on Thursday.
The three were slated to arrive in the US by nighttime, and were part of a 24-person prisoner exchange that is one of the biggest since the end of the Cold War. The swap involved the US, Russia, Germany and three other Western nations.
One of Putin’s greatest foes – who is a Russian-British citizen – was freed from a penal colony in Siberia as part of a major exchange of political prisoners between Russia and the West.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was part of Russia’s beleaguered opposition, was behind bars since April 2022, and suffered two near-fatal poisoning attempts in the years before his arrest.
‘All have endured unimaginable suffering and uncertainty,’ stated US President Joe Biden. ‘Today, their agony is over.’
Biden in the White House stood with the families of Gershkovich, Kurmasheva, Whelan and Kara-Murza as they spoke to their families by phone.
‘These families never lost hope,’ wrote Biden on X (formerly Twitter). ‘And today, they’ll each be reunited with the missing piece of their soul.’
Biden in address sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to Kurmasheva’s daughter, Miriam Butorin, who turns 13 years old tomorrow.
‘Now, she gets to celebrate with her mom. That’s what this is all about, families able to be together again, but they should have been all along,’ he said.
‘Thank you again to everyone who did their part. In just a few hours, welcome home, our fellow Americans. We’re looking forward to that, God willing, Thank you. And it’s a good day.’
Biden also thanked the US’s allies for ‘bold and brave decisions’ that led to the prisoners’ release.
The swap ‘would not have been made possible without our allies, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway and Turkey, they all stepped up, and they stood with us’, Biden said.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were set to await the citizens’ arrival on American soil at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.
Kara-Murza, who is a US legal permanent resident, will be meeting Biden and then going to Germany to reunite withhis family, according to US national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
‘We expect him back here in the United States soon,’ said Sullivan.
Biden in another X post showing the group on a plane wrote: ‘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.’
German national and Red Cross employee Rico Krieger and Russian opposition member Ilya Yashin are also included in the exchange.
Putin signed a decree to pardon the prisoners with ‘the aim of returning Russian citizens detained and imprisoned in foreign countries’, stated the Kremlin, which added it was ‘grateful to the leadership of all countries that provided assistance in preparing the exchange’.
Turkish television channel NTV reported that an exchange of prisoners took place at Ankara airport.
Signs of a deal between Russia and Belarus on one side and the US, Germany and Slovenia on the other, multiplied today after several foreign prisoners disappeared from jail.
Flight tracking site Flightradar24 showed that a special Russian government plane used for a previous prisoner swap, involving the US and Russia, had flown from Moscow to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad which borders Poland and Lithuania before heading back to the Russian capital.
Pervy Otdel, an association that specialises in defending people in Russian cases of treason and espionage, said the flight could mean that an exchange had taken place on the Polish border.
Ivan Pavlov, a Russian human rights lawyer who founded Pervy Otdel, said the disappearance of so many people with similar profiles suggested the authorities were gathering them, probably in Moscow, for the exchange.
Earlier, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, when asked about reports of a looming major prisoner exchange, said: ‘I’m still not making any comments on this.’
The White House has been in extensive talks to achieve the release of Gershkovich and Whelan.
It is unclear if Britain has also been part of the ongoing negotiations to free Kara-Murza.
Who is Vladimir Kara-Murza?
Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in a maximum security jail for treason and ‘discrediting the military’ – the longest time ever given to a critic of the Kremlin.
A protégé of murdered Putin rival Boris Nemtsov, he was the vice-chairman of the Open Russia movement, a political organisation founded by businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which promotes civil society and democracy in the country.
He caught the Kremlin’s eye after producing a seminal documentary about the fall of the USSR which highlighted how Putin had become president despite having been a loyal officer of the oppressive KGB spy force.
His platform grew as he penned a series of books, blog posts and press articles highlighting the repression of dissidents in Russia.
His wife Evgenia sat down with Metro.co.uk last year about the ongoing efforts to free her husband.
She said ‘publicity is her only weapon’ against Putin’s regime, adding that she is being pushed forward by ‘fury and indignation’.
Kara-Murza is reportedly not planning to stay silent now that he has been freed.
‘He’s definitely not going to stop,’ William Browder, who heads the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, said on MSNBC.
‘He wants to go down to Latin America and get the Latin American countries to pass Magnitsky Acts so they can freeze the assets of the Putin regime and other Russian criminals.’
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