Today’s Prisoner Exchange

Today’s prisoner exchange with Russia was an amazing deal, brought together by multiple countries over two years. The Wall Street Journal has a detailed, ungated(!) story. I’m delighted to see that Christo Grozev played a significant part. I worked with Christo on a couple of issues when he was at Bellingcat.

When a Russian hitman, Vadim Krasikov, was picked up in Germany for killing a Russian dissident in Berlin, Vladimir Putin decided to get him back by using one of his favorite gambits: jail Americans who might be traded for him. This kind of trade puts the United States and Germany in a difficult position. Acceding to an exchange could incentivize more such arrests in Russia, but leaving innocent citizens in Russian prison camps is unacceptable.

The Washington Post has a list of the people exchanged (gift link), with a graphic showing 4 prisoners going to the US and 12 to Germany, with prisoners from the US, Germany, Solvenia, Norway, and Poland going to Russia.

At one point in the negotiations, it seemed as if Alexei Navalny might be included in the exchange, but then he was killed in a Russian prison camp.

It looks like little of Kremlin politics can be discerned in this exchange. Putin wanted Krasikov back, and a deal was put together. In American politics, Donald Trump has been claiming that his friend Putin would send Evan Gershkovich back if he were elected, between the election and his inauguration. According to the WSJ article, this may be because Trump got wind of the deal in progress.

But now that hope is dashed, and Trump is grumpy.

“I got back many hostages, and gave the opposing Country NOTHING,” former President Donald Trump said on his Truth Social platform.

“They’re calling the trade ‘complex’ – That’s so nobody can figure out how bad it is!”

On the Sunday that President Joe Biden announced that he was withdrawing his candidacy for another term, the negotiations were coming to fruition. This kind of negotiation had to include the President. He and his team seem to have been more competent than some alleged in the runup to that withdrawal. How much Biden was involved is one more of those things about the last month that we probably won’t know for another several years.

Vice President Kamala Harris had a part in briefing Slovenian officials of progress at the Munich Security Conference.

Here’s Biden’s statement and a post from the POTUS account.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner