Amid high tensions between the United States and Russia, a complex, multinational prisoner exchange took place on August 1. Eight Russians, imprisoned in the U.S. and European countries on charges including cybercrimes, espionage and murder, were released in exchange for 16 Americans, Russians and Europeans held in Russian jails.
The latter included prominent Russian opposition leaders, such as Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, and a number of Americans, notably Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, who were both held on espionage charges. A German citizen sentenced to death in Belarus was also released.
The exchange, the culmination of intricate diplomacy involving at least six countries that began in January 2022, as recounted in rich detail by Masha Gessen in The New York Times, has a number of significant implications and raises important questions.
First, the deal is a domestic political win for all sides. For President Joe Biden, it marks a major diplomatic achievement from which the Democratic presidential candidate in November’s elections, Vice President Kamala Harris, stands to benefit. Democrats will likely use the fact that Paul Whelan was arrested in 2018, when Donald Trump was president, and then released on Biden’s watch despite Trump’s boasts that only he could conduct effective diplomacy with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
As for Putin, he obtained the release of convicted Russian spies and cybercriminals. Putin made the point of offering a red carpet and flowers to the Russians at the airport in Moscow where he delivered a speech lauding their “loyalty to the oath, duty and homeland.”
Many Russians may have shuddered at the sight of their president hugging a convicted murderer when Russian soldiers are used as cannon fodder on Ukrainian battlefields. Yet such rhetoric goes down well with that segment of Russian society that supports a hardline approach to the West and local “traitors.”
His main prize was Vadim Krasikov, who was sentenced to life in prison in Germany for assassinating a Chechen militant in Berlin in 2019. Krasikov’s importance to Putin is underscored by the fact that he dragged out the negotiations specifically to secure Krasikov’s release and even agreed to release Kara-Murza, probably Russia's most prominent opposition leader (and himself the target of two alleged poisoning attempts) after the death in prison in February of Alexei Navalny.
Putin also agreed on a deal that is numerically far more favorable to the West than to Russia in contrast to the strict parity as had been the custom in previous exchanges.
The situation is more fraught for the exchange’s third most important protagonist, Germany, where Krasikov was convicted and imprisoned, and whose government’s agreement was essential for his release. There, the swap’s politics exposed rifts within the ruling coalition. The Social Democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz, was happy to help Biden in getting the Americans out of Russia. To make Krasikov’s release politically palatable, Scholz, in coordination with the Americans, insisted that the two Russian political prisoners were included in the exchange.
According to the German newspaper Die Zeit, however, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock of the Green party was vehemently opposed to any deal with Russia, as it would reward Moscow’s “hostage diplomacy.” As a result, the deal was brokered by the German chancellery rather than the foreign ministry, giving Scholz bragging rights as he faces a tough reelection battle next year.
A second major implication of the exchange relates to the rising role of the hedgers — middle-sized powers navigating their way between the West and its adversaries. According to German media, the first meeting of American and German intelligence officers with their Russian counterparts to discuss the swap took place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The Turkish intelligence service MIT also played a pivotal mediation role between the U.S., Germany and Russia, and the exchange itself took place in Ankara.
Turkey is a NATO member but has refused to join Western sanctions against Russia, a move that earned it a modicum of trust in Moscow. On the one hand, that poses a challenge to Washington as Turkey’s booming trade with Russia includes dual-use items that could have military applications. On the other hand, Washington needs to tread carefully as Turkey and its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was instrumental not only in securing the prisoner exchange but, previously, in brokering the trilateral Russia-Ukraine-Turkey deal that permitted uninterrupted grain exports from Ukraine to world markets via the Black Sea.
Turkey could also play a key role in any future negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.
And that brings us to the most intriguing question: was the prisoner exchange strictly transactional or might it herald a revival of U.S.–Russia diplomacy to help bring about an end to the war in Ukraine and resolve broader issues between the West and Russia?
Historically, prisoner exchanges often served as a prelude to negotiations on key areas of conflict. In 1962, the first-ever such exchange between the U.S. and the USSR (immortalized on the screen by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks in “Bridge of Spies”) augured a policy of détente pursued by the John Kennedy and Nikita Khruschev administrations.
More recently, U.S. prisoner swaps with another accomplished practitioner of hostage diplomacy, Iran, – led to de-escalation in the nuclear stand-off between the two countries.
Any immediate diplomatic breakthroughs on Ukraine may look unlikely. However, subtle shifts may point in that direction: a recent poll by the Kyiv International Institute for Sociology showed that a majority of Ukrainians now favor talks with Russia. President Zelensky himself signaled openness to talk to Russia in a “new peace summit.”
Since the default position of the West was that nothing may be done without the consent of the Ukrainians, the time may be ripening for Washington and its allies to reframe their objectives from a maximalist and ill-defined Ukrainian victory to ensuring Kyiv is in a stronger position for negotiations.
The recent prisoner exchange may have nothing to do with Ukraine, but it shows that channels of communications with Moscow are open and may lead to concrete results given sufficient political will. They should be expanded to bring the war to an end.
