When President Vladimir Putin greeted Russian citizens in the largest prisoner exchange with the West since the Cold War on Thursday evening, a complicated months-long negotiation process was coming to an end and a powerful public relations campaign was beginning in Russia, where the returnees have been described as patriots. The Eurasian country seeks to present itself as a nation open to dialogue, even if the cards are marked. “I want to thank you for being faithful to your oath, to your duty and to your country, which has not forgotten you,” Putin told the group, which included the Russian-Spanish Pablo Gonzalez, accused in Poland of being an agent of Russian military intelligence, and the hitman-spy Vadim Krasikov, sentenced to life in prison in Germany for murdering a Chechen exile, and whom the Kremlin chief greeted with a hug. Krasikov’s return to Russia was Moscow’s main objective in the exchange.
With the exchange, Russia has released and sent away not only Americans, such as the journalist from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Evan Gershkovich, but also a large group of Russian political prisoners and dissidents — including prominent Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza. With this move, the Kremlin is trying to send several messages. The first is that it does not abandon its own, as former President Dmitry Medvedev has repeatedly said. “Of course I would like Russia’s traitors to rot in prison… but it is more useful to release our own, those who have worked for our country, for the homeland, for all of us,” he said on his Telegram channel.
Among those who arrived in Moscow, greeted with a bouquet of flowers by the Kremlin chief, were Artem and Anna Dultsev, alias Maria and Luis, and their two young children. The couple, who had been posing as Argentine for years, were convicted in Slovenia of espionage. The Dultsevs had built up an intense cover (of the kind for “illegal” or unregistered spies), speaking to each other and to their children in Spanish, to the point that the children only found out that they were Russian on the plane to Moscow, where Putin addressed them in Spanish. “Good night,” he told them, according to the account of Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov.
The details that are beginning to emerge about the exchange show a very complex architecture, with the participation of several Western countries, such as Poland, where González, also called Pavel Rubtsov, was imprisoned, or Slovenia, where the Dultsevs were arrested in 2022. European intelligence sources speak of a work lasting many months and of how Russia increased its policy of arresting Western citizens to feed a possible exchange.
Russia has been pursuing a policy of taking hostages for years, then exchanging them for its own assets, imprisoned abroad. In the Eurasian country, espionage and hybrid warfare activities (such as cyber attacks) are part of the defense doctrine and are a source of pride. Putin was a spy for the Soviet secret service KGB and head of its successor agency, the FSB, and has always praised as “patriots” those who have served as agents, especially in the West. Those exchanged will be decorated, the head of the Kremlin has announced.
Russia’s flattering reception of the returned prisoners also comes at a time when the Kremlin is trying to rebuild its spy network abroad, after the severe blow suffered by the expulsions following the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Knowing what’s happening outside means understanding what’s going to happen inside, so don’t miss anything.
KEEP READING
US Coordination
The United States, which was trying to recover Gershkovich, arrested in March 2023, accused and convicted of espionage, the journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, arrested in October last year, and the former marine Paul Whelan, convicted in 2020, coordinated the 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, has played a substantial role in the agreement. Putin has shown enormous interest in bringing back the spy-hitman Krasikov, arrested in 2019 for murdering a prominent Chechen refugee linked to the opposition in a Berlin park. So much so that there has been speculation that the head of the Kremlin had met him during his time in St. Petersburg.
In November last year, shortly after the arrest of Kurmasheva, who works for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Washington offered Moscow four names for a possible exchange: the Dultsevs, Gonzalez and another Russian military intelligence (GRU) officer posing as a Brazilian (alias Jose) in Norway, where he had been detained.
The Kremlin was not satisfied with the exchange. It wanted more, and above all, it wanted Krasikov. Meanwhile, the team of the imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was moving to make him part of the exchange as well. Bulgarian journalist Christo Grozev, who has been on a crusade for years to uncover Russian spies (it was he who identified Krasikov) and is very close to the dissident, began to apply pressure and put on the table other names of Russians who could be exchanged.
In the Kremlin, where the “collective West” is spoken of, they were receptive to a combined exchange of several countries. And even more so since in 2023 Iran exchanged a Dane, two Austrians and a Belgian in exchange for an Iranian imprisoned in Belgium, notes a source in Moscow.
In Russia, meanwhile, the situation of those imprisoned was getting worse. Navalny’s too. And Gershkovich’s mother, who, as the WSJ reports, has been key in moving the Western bureaucratic machinery, began to push. She spoke personally with Biden, who promised to speak with Scholz to add the spy-hitman to the exchange package, even though letting him go in that exchange could have a significant political price.
Scholz to Biden: “I will do it for you”
The political negotiation was 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 helping to free Navalny, arrested in Moscow in January 2021, on his return from Germany, where he had recovered from a near-fatal poisoning carried out by the Kremlin.
But last February, when everything seemed to be on track, Navalny died in mysterious circumstances in the maximum security prison in the Arctic where he had been sent. Everything froze for weeks. Until Russian dissidents and activists began to be added to the list, such as Yashin, Kara-Murza, Andrei Pivovarov, who did not really want to leave Russia, but to fight from within. Also others, such as the artist Sasha Skochilenko, arrested for changing the price labels in supermarkets with messages against the war in Ukraine and sentenced to seven years in prison.
The group, which Russia considers traitors and was held in appalling conditions in penal colonies spread across the Eurasian country, arrived in Germany on Thursday evening. “I was sure I would die in prison,” Kara-Murza admitted after being released, during a call with his family, who were with Biden at the White House. He had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for high treason and speaking out about the Russian military for his messages against Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The Kremlin is still holding Western prisoners and hundreds of Russian political prisoners. “It has not abandoned its hostage policy, but it is now interested in showing some openness,” says a senior European source.
The second message sent between the lines by Moscow – which Western sources deeply distrust – is that there is room for negotiation. This is a particularly important element in the face of Ukraine, where Putin’s large-scale invasion has been going on for two and a half years, and is directed above all at those (not only in Europe and the United States, but also in the so-called Global South) who are tired of the war, of the support sent to kyiv, and are calling for a ceasefire.
“Sowing doubts in the West about the utility of continuing to support Ukraine may be victory enough, but the Kremlin is taking a risk,” Sam Greene of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) wrote in an analysis on social media.
The swap does not mean that Russia and the “collective West” are ready for broader agreements, says Russian political scientist Andrei Koleshnikov. But the choreography of how it happened and when is very revealing about the Kremlin’s backroom and its ways of acting. It also reveals the West’s fear and uncertainty about the coming months. The proximity of the US election and the fear that Republican Donald Trump, who is perceived as close to the Kremlin, might return to the White House, precipitated the deal.
Not just the US, but Germany too, says analyst Tatiana Stanovaya. Scholz agreed to do so because of Biden — and because he helped free a dozen Russian dissidents — but it doesn’t seem possible that he did so because of Trump, says the analyst.
Follow all the international information at Facebook and Xor in our weekly newsletter.
