Another accomplishment to add to Biden’s legacy
A prisoner swap at a Turkish airport on Thursday involving seven countries freed the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and two other Americans held in Russia, along with several jailed Russian opposition figures, the White House said, in the most far-reaching exchange between Russia and the West in decades.
The scope of the deal has little precedent in the post-Soviet era. For the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, Moscow freed prominent dissidents as part of a swap; 16 people in total were released from Russian custody. In exchange, eight people were freed by the West, after a complex web of negotiations that took place behind the scenes for months among nations that are otherwise bitterly at odds over Russian aggression in Ukraine.
The exchange took place at the international airport in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, and involved seven different planes ferrying 24 prisoners from the United States, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway, and Russia, a Turkish intelligence official said.
The deal seemed sure to prompt jubilation among Western nations that had condemned the charges against the imprisoned Americans and opposition figures as baseless and politically motivated. It also delivered a diplomatic victory for President Biden, who has long pledged to bring home imprisoned Americans and to support Russia’s embattled pro-democracy movement.
It was also a triumph of a different sort for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who can use the deal to highlight his loyalty to Russian agents who get arrested abroad. But the deal also carried risks at home for him, by releasing imprisoned politicians who could energize Russia’s moribund, exiled opposition.
Meanwhile, no: