Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
“Russia freed U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich and ex-U.S. Marine Paul Whelan on Thursday as part of the biggest prisoner exchange of its kind since the end of the Cold War. The White House said the U.S. had negotiated the trade with Russia, Germany and three other countries. The deal, negotiated in secrecy for more than a year, involved 24 prisoners, including 16 moving from Russia to the West and eight prisoners held in the West being sent back to Russia. Germany confirmed that they included Vadim Krasikov, convicted of murdering an exiled dissident in Berlin.” Reuters
Both sides celebrate the exchange but lament the high cost:
“Credit to the White House for pulling off this complicated swap… Americans and the released Russian dissidents owe a particular debt to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. His country held Vadim Krasikov, the assassin most coveted by Vladimir Putin. Krasikov killed a Chechen emigre in a public park in Berlin in 2019 and was serving a deserved life sentence…
“The ugly truth is that Russia and other thuggish regimes take hostages because it works. Iran has also made it a policy to arrest innocent Americans to trade for Iranians justly held in the U.S. China has done the same with Canadians. These countries know that hostages become powerful political symbols in the West, as pressure on democratic leaders increases to negotiate their release…
“Mr. Putin has paid no price for imprisoning Mr. Gershkovich beyond bad publicity, and that he can ignore. At the same time he has won the release of his spies and an assassin. The release of Krasikov means he can tell his killers that even if they are captured abroad, he has a strategy to win their release. All of this poses an awful dilemma for U.S. policy makers.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“This prisoner swap should never have been necessary because Mr. Kara-Murza, Mr. Gershkovich and the others should never have been imprisoned. They did nothing to justify the long sentences they were given and in most cases did nothing criminal at all. They were seized and imprisoned for exercising their elementary human rights…
“What’s more, Russia took them to trade for Russians who committed real offenses, including an assassin, spies and one of the biggest hackers ever apprehended. For the sake of freeing those who were innocent, it is possible to tolerate swapping them… [But] let there be no hint of moral equivalency between them — much less between the democracies that sought humanely to end the captivity and the Russian despotism that cynically initiated it.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
“Even as we celebrate the liberation of these innocent people, it is hard to avoid the troubling fact that Putin has successfully used their detentions to get real criminals out of the prisons where they belong, most notably Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin serving a life sentence in Germany. Biden was right to do everything he could to bring back wrongfully imprisoned Americans, but the readiness of authoritarian states like Russia to seize innocent foreigners as hostages is galling.”
Serge Schmemann, New York Times
Other opinions below.
“Trump [had] bragged, as he has when speaking of many problems, that only he could solve the problem… [but] it seems that we don’t need Trump as a savior to wrest the nation’s foreign policy from the bungling clutches of Team Biden. It turns out that sometimes Biden & Co. know what they’re doing…
“This is a major blow to Trump. It turns out that his return to the White House was not a precondition for wrangling Gershkovich and others—including Paul Whelan, who was arrested in 2018—out of their Russian hellholes. It also turns out his view of the world is seriously flawed…
“Trump figured that Putin would release Gershkovich as a personal favor to him… But it turns out that most world leaders make decisions based on their interests. And for reasons that haven’t yet been revealed, Putin decided that it was in his interest to make the deal now.”
Fred Kaplan, Slate
“Gershkovich was detained under Biden, not Trump… because the president had shown Putin that he would make significant concessions even in the face of blatantly unjust Russian detentions. Putin learned this lesson in December 2022 when Biden exchanged a major Russian arms dealer, Viktor Bout, for the WNBA star Brittney Griner…
“As I warned shortly before that swap, ‘This arrangement would only encourage Russia to conduct more extensive hostage-taking of Americans in the future.’… Gershkovich was detained three months later… The way to deal with Griner’s detention was not to release Bout but rather to steadily increase pressure on Russia…
“The next time an American is taken hostage or U.S. interests are otherwise attacked by Russia, the first U.S. response should not be to enter a long process of negotiations. Instead, the U.S. should escalate.”
Tom Rogan, Washington Examiner
