An unprecedented prisoner swap was completed on August 1 after the West and Russia exchanged a total of 26 prisoners, the likes of which has not been seen since 1985 during the depths of the Cold War.

Russia gave up the elite of its political prisoners from the opposition, as well as two US journalists that are widely seen has having been snatched by the Kremlin on trumped up charges simply to be used as bargaining chips in the exchange. For its part, the West gave up cybercriminals, spies and an assassin.

More interestingly, as bne IntelliNews argued in a recent opinion piece, the deal was lopsided, with Russia giving up twice as many prisoners, and high value ones at that, versus the West, which simply gave up crooks and murderers.

The Kremlin has been signalling for months that it is ready for peace talks to end the war in Ukraine, which has also been inching towards a ceasefire as pressure mounts on Bankova. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy added to the speculation that a deal may happen at a second peace summit in November after saying he might call for a referendum on the issue of conceding land to Russia a day earlier.

The two sides have been so far apart, with both holding maximalist positions, that the introduction of the possibility of allowing Russia to retain some of the 20% of Ukraine’s territory it currently occupies introduces some middle ground that can become the basis of real talks, and brings the negotiating positions closer to the Istanbul peace deal that was already agreed in April 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin has already offered a ceasefire along these lines on the eve of the failed Swiss peace summit held on June 16-17.

Who were the people in the swap?

 

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The Hitman: Vadim Krasikov

Krasikov, 58, is a convicted FSB hitman, who was jailed for life over the murder in a Berlin park of exiled Chechen-Georgian dissident Zelimkhan “Tornike” Khangoshvili.

Krasikov shot him three times in broad daylight in Berlin’s Tiergarten park on August 23, 2019 and was quickly caught. Khangoshvili, a Georgian citizen of Chechen descent, had fought against Russian forces in Chechnya before seeking asylum in Germany. A German judge accused Russia of state terrorism, saying the order to kill must have come from President Vladimir Putin himself.

Moscow has rejected that interpretation, but in a February interview with US journalist Tucker Carlson, Putin referred to Krasikov as a “Russian patriot” and that he was the prisoner he most wanted in an exchange for US journalist Evan Gershkovich. Without naming Krasikov, Putin referred to a person who “due to patriotic sentiments, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals.”

Krasikov was the keystone that made a deal possible. A colonel in the FSB, he has been at the centre of prisoner exchange talks that have been going on for years. Any deal that excluded Krasikov was a non-starter for the Kremlin. Putin is wholly reliant on the FSB that is the foundation of his grip on power, which made it essential that he, as the president of Russia, demonstrate to the FSB that he would “take care of our own.”  

This presented a moral dilemma for Germany; Berlin was reluctant to release a man who had committed murder on its territory, a stance that conflicted with its vaunted values. It was a problem for the US too, which after swapping the notorious arms deal Viktor Bout for the US basketball player Brittney Griner in 2022, had no high-level Russian prisoners to exchange. US President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz met at the start of this year to discuss the possibility of Germany letting Krasikov go and Berlin suggested trading him for Opposition figure and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, who is well known in Germany after he spent nearly a year recouping from a poising attack.

But as soon as the Kremlin got wind of this idea, Navalny was murdered on February 16 to simply take that card off the table, according to anti-Corruption Foundation Chair Maria Pevchikh, and Navalny’s successor. On August 1, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan confirmed that Alexei Navalny was intended to be part of a prisoner exchange before dying in prison under suspicious circumstances.

Thanks to Krasikov, Germany has played a key role in the cutting the prisoner swap deal and a total of five Germans were released, including Rico Krieger, a German national that was convicted on terrorism charges on June and sentenced to death. Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko was clearly roped into the prisoner swap negations to add a fresh card to Putin’s hand.

The Slovenian Spies: Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva

Artem and Anna Dultseva are nominally an Argentinian couple that have been living in Slovenia since 2017, until it was revealed they were sleeper spies and arrested. The couple had settled in the capital Ljubljana in 2017 using Argentinian passports and ran a startup IT company and an online art gallery respectively.

Their true identities were uncovered in 2022 and they were sentenced to more than a year and a half in prison this week after being found guilty of spying in a trial that was closed to the public. From their base in Ljubljana, the couple travelled extensively throughout the EU, visiting Nato countries.

On July 31, 2024, just one day before a planned prisoner swap, they pleaded guilty to spying and falsifying documents. Sentenced to 19 months in jail, they were released on time served and ordered to leave Slovenia.

They passed on orders from Moscow and provided cash to other sleeper agents in Europe. Their two children, who attended an international school in Ljubljana, were also included in the swap.

The Norwegian Sleeper: Mikhail Mikushin

Mikhail Mikushin was arrested in the Norwegian city of Tromsø in October 2022, using the alias Jose Assis Giammaria, where he posed as a Brazilian citizen and guest lecturer at the Arctic University of Norway.

An investigation by The Insider and Bellingcat, released shortly after his arrest, identified Mikushin as a "poorly disguised GRU (Russian military intelligence) officer" who couldn’t speak Portuguese, Brazil’s national language.

Over a year later, in December 2023, Norwegian authorities announced that Mikushin had finally confessed to his true Russian identity.

The Spanish Spy: Pavel Rubtsov

Pavel Rubtsov, born in Moscow and having later relocated to Spain, was arrested in Poland near the Ukrainian border shortly after Russia's full-scale invasion. At the time of his arrest he identified himself as Pablo González, a Spanish journalist.

Polish authorities accused Rubtsov of espionage, alleging he used his journalistic credentials as cover. The US news organisation Voice of America reported that he was "identified as an agent of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Federation (GRU)" and was accused by Poland of using his journalist status to spy.  

Like the Slovenian spies, Rubtsov travelled widely, including to armed conflicts zones and areas of political tension. During his time in Poland, Rubtsov "obtained information the use of which by the Russian secret services could have a direct negative impact on the internal and external security and defence of our country," Polish authorities said as cited by Kyiv Independent, and he was en route to Ukraine to "continue his activities" at the time of his arrest.

The Cybercrook: Roman Seleznev

Roman Seleznev was indicted in 2011 but only arrested in 2014 in the Maldives, where he had gone on holiday. He was charged with hacking into the databases of US retailers to steal credit card data. His activities caused US firms an estimated $169mn of losses. He was jailed for 27 years in 2017.

A search of his laptop revealed 1.7mn stolen credit card numbers, according to the US Justice Department, which also reported that Seleznev made at least $2mn in profit from selling the data. Roman Seleznev is the son of Valery Seleznev, a long-time member of Russia's parliament.

In 2017 he pleaded guilty to participating in a racketeering scheme in Nevada and conspiracy to commit bank fraud in the US state of Georgia. He was given additional jail terms of 14 years each, to run concurrently with the earlier sentence.

The Hacker: Vladislav Klyushin

Vladislav Klyushin was convicted by a US court in February 2023 and sentenced to nine years in jail for making millions of dollars through insider trading using hacked information.

Described as an “elaborate hack-to-trade scheme”, he hacked into company systems to steal confidential information that was then used to trade securities, netting some $93mn. Arrested in Switzerland in 2021, he was subsequently extradited to the US.

The Arms Trafficker: Vadim Konoshchenok

Vadim Konoshchenok, who had been detained multiple times in Estonia for attempting to smuggle US weapons and technology into Russia, was indicted in December 2022. He was finally extradited to the US in July 2023 on charges of smuggling and sanctions violations. Like Viktor Bout, Washington alleges the 48-year-old has “ties to Russia’s FSB”.

 

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US reporter: Evan Gershkovich

The 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter was arrested in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg in March 2023 and accused of spying for the CIA.

Gershkovich was clearly grabbed for use as a bargaining chip in a potential prisoner swap  and has the highest profile of any of Russia’s foreign national political prisoners.

Russia alleged Gershkovich had been caught “red-handed” spying on a factory in the Urals that was making tanks for use in Ukraine, but presented no evidence to support its claims. He was sentenced to 16 years in jail for espionage after a three-day trial that was closed to the media on grounds of state secrecy. The US designated the journalist “wrongfully detained”, saying the case was politically motivated.

US reporter: Alsu Kurmasheva

US-Russian journalist Kurmasheva, 47, was sentenced to six years and six months on July 19 – the same day as Gershkovich – in an ultra-secret trial, which was not reported until days later. An editor with the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty outlet, she was accused of violating Russia’s strict military censorship laws and arrested while travelling to Russia from her home in Prague to see her sick mother. RFE/RL called her case a “mockery of justice”.

US citizen: Paul Whelan

A former US marine with US, British, Irish and Canadian citizenship, Whelan was arrested in a Moscow hotel in 2018, allegedly with a cache of classified documents, when he was the security director of a US car parts manufacturer. Like Gershkovich, 54-year-old Whelan strongly denied the charges against him and was designated by the US as “wrongfully detained”.

Opposition figure: Vladimir Kara-Murza

Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison as a staunch critic of the Kremlin. He openly condemned Moscow’s campaign in Ukraine – illegal in Russia – and was given one of the harshest sentences ever handed to a Putin critic.

One of the most senior opposition figures in a Russian jail, he is an intellectual and a dual British-Russian national. The 42-year-old was arrested in April 2022 after a speech in the US where he accused Russia of “war crimes” against Ukraine, but he had refused to flee Russia like many of his colleagues had done.

In May he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize “for passionate columns written at great personal risk from his prison cell” that were published in The Washington Post.

Friends and family worried that his life was in danger after his health began to deteriorate while in prison. Kara-Murza suffers from a nerve condition after the Kremlin tried to poisoning him twice in the 2010s.

Opposition figure: Ilya Yashin

Ilya Yashin is the other very senior Russian opposition figure who was incarcerated by the Kremlin. He was jailed and sentenced to 8.5 years in prison in December 2022, on charges of spreading “false information” after condemning the Bucha  massacre in the same year. Like Kara-Murza, he refused to leave Russia despite the threat of arrest.

Yashin rose to prominence in a wave of anti-Kremlin protests in 2011-12 and was a long-time friend and ally of Navalny. He was also friends with Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in Moscow in 2015. He tried to united the opposition into a single entity to contest previous Duma elections, but his People's Freedom Party (PARNAS) fell apart due to egotism and infighting amongst the opposition members and polled less than 1%.

Yashin was elected head of a Moscow district council in 2017 but was repeatedly blocked from standing for higher office. He has been branded a “foreign agent” by the Russian government.

Opposition figure: Oleg Orlov

Unlike, Kara-Murza and Yashin, Orlov was not actively opposing the Kremlin, competing in elections or calling for a new political system or leaders.

Orlov is veteran civil society activist and key figure in Memorial, the Nobel Prize-winning and now-banned human rights organisation. Memorial was Russia’s first and most successful civil society organisation, set up to address Russia’s bloody past and come to terms with the horrors of the Soviet Union, especially the “Terror” under Stalin in the 1930s. Amongst the events and historical research Memorial carried out, they held an annual candle-lit vigil outside the old KGB headquarters on Lubyanka in central Moscow where participants read out the names of Stalin’s victims, often family members that had died in the Terror.

Orlov was jailed for two and a half years in February after calling Russia a “fascist” state and criticising its invasion of Ukraine. Memorial said the 71-year-old Orlov’s trial was “a mockery of justice and an attack on the fundamental right to free expression”.

Opposition figure: Andrei Pivovarov

Pivovarov, a Russian opposition activist, headed the pro-democracy Open Russia foundation, which was funded by exiled former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who himself spent a decade in prison for campaigning against Putin. Pivovarov was forcibly removed from a plane by Russian intelligence agents before he could leave the country, and sentenced to four years in a penal colony in July 2022 for collaborating with an “undesirable” organisation.

Opposition figure: Alexandra Skochilenko

The artist Alexandra Skochilenko is probably the most innocent of the prisoners. She was arrested for what would be seen as a prank in another country, when she replaced the price labels on goods on the shelves in  her local supermarket with new labels bearing anti-war statements. She was jailed for seven years in November 2023 on charges of spreading “false information”. Better known as Sasha, the 33-year-old from Saint Petersburg was arrested in April 2022 after an elderly customer at the supermarket found the messages and complained to the police.

Team Navalny: Lilia Chanysheva

Chanysheva, who once headed late opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s offices in the central Bashkortostan republic, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison in June 2023 for having created an “extremist organisation”, a sentence that was increased to nine and a half years in April. An accountant, the 42-year-old had worked for major companies including Deloitte before joining Navalny’s team in 2017 and openly protesting against corruption in the region.

Team Navalny: Ksenia Fadeyeva

Fadeyeva led Navalny’s now-banned organisation in the Siberian city of Tomsk, where the opposition leader was poisoned in August 2020, and was sentenced to nine years in prison in December 2023 for “extremism”. The 32-year-old was elected to the Tomsk city legislature in 2020, a move hailed as a victory for the Russian opposition in the struggle against Putin’s rule.

Team Navalny: Vadim Ostanin

The former head of another of Navalny’s regional branches, Ostanin was sentenced in 2023 to nine years in prison for participating in an “extremist” organisation.

German national: Kevin Lik

Lik, who was arrested when he was 17 and is a dual Russian-German citizen, became the youngest person ever convicted of treason in Russia when he was sentenced in 2023 to four years for allegedly sending photos of a Russian military facility visible from his apartment window to German security services.

German national: German Moyzhes

Moyzhes, another Russian-German dual national, was facing treason charges after he was arrested in Saint Petersburg in May, according to Russian state media. Almost no details of the case against him had been made public. Moyzhes, an immigration lawyer, was well known in Saint Petersburg as an urban activist and pro-cycle campaigner.

German national: Patrick Schoebel

A German citizen, Schoebel was arrested earlier this year at Saint Petersburg airport after customs officials found cannabis gummy bears in his luggage.

German national: Dieter Voronin

A dual Russian-German citizen Voronin was sentenced to 13 years in prison on “treason” charges after Moscow alleged he received classified military information from another journalist, Ivan Safronov, who remains behind bars.

German national: Rico Krieger

Belarus sentenced Rico Krieger, a 30-year-old German national, to death in June after accusing him of photographing military sites and placing an explosive device on a railway line near Minsk on the orders of Ukraine. President Alexander Lukashenko pardoned Krieger only a few days before the prisoner exchange, in another sign that the swap deal was imminent.