At a warm and breezy Ankara airport on Thursday seven aeroplanes — two from the US, and one each from Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway and Russia — converged and set off one of the biggest and most complex prisoner swaps since the cold war.
Ten individuals were transferred to Russia, 13 to Germany and three to the US, according to Turkish security officials. They included US journalist Evan Gershkovich and former US marine Paul Whelan, and their release was the result of months of secret, high-level backroom talks between heads of state, diplomats and shadowy security officials.
The deal was set in motion with a phone call between US President Joe Biden and Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz in January.
The US team working to free Gershkovich, Whelan and journalists Alsu Kurmasheva and Vladimir Kara-Murza, had realised that a deal to secure their release would only happen if they could convince Germany’s chancellor to free Vadim Krasikov, a Russian serving a life sentence for the murder of a Chechen dissident in a Berlin park in 2019.
No ordinary criminal, Krasikov was close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had for years been calling for his release. On Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that Krasikov was employed by Russia’s FSB security service and had served in its Alpha special forces unit.
Germany had long balked at the idea of including Krasikov in any prisoner deal because of the severity of his crime, but Biden broached the issue in his call with Scholz. During a visit to Washington on February 9, the chancellor agreed to include the convicted murderer.
“For you, I will do this,” Scholz told Biden, a senior US administration official recounted. The president then turned to his national security adviser Jake Sullivan and directed him to “get it done”, the senior official said.
The initial plan devised by Washington and Berlin was to include Russian dissident Alexei Navalny in the swap. The activist, who was held in brutal conditions in a Siberian prison colony, had a special connection with Germany, which in 2020 had helped him recover when he was poisoned with a nerve agent in an operation widely blamed on the Kremlin.
But just days after Scholz had agreed to trade Krasikov, Navalny’s death was suddenly announced, with the news rippling through the ornate Bayerischer Hof hotel where the chancellor and many other senior international officials had gathered for the annual Munich Security Conference.
As the obstacles mounted vice-president Kamala Harris, the most senior US official at the conference, went ahead with a meeting with Slovenia’s Prime Minister Robert Golob after learning Ljubljana had two Russians in custody that would be of interest to Moscow.
She pressed him for their inclusion in the deal shortly before she addressed the forum, where she lambasted Russia for Navalny’s death and called it “a further sign of Putin’s brutality”.
Halfway around the world at the White House, Gershkovich’s parents were that day at a pre-planned meeting with Sullivan.
After hearing of Navalny’s death “the team felt like the wind had been taken out of our sails”, a senior administration official said. “Jake, however, felt differently, and he stressed to both [Evan’s parents] Ella [Milman] and Mikhail [Gershkovich] that he still saw a path forward,” the official added.
Sullivan then directed his team to “not let Navalny’s death totally torpedo our opportunities to get these folks home” and to come up with options that would keep the deal politically viable for the Germans.
The next day in Munich, Harris met Scholz to push him to keep Krasikov as part of any deal, knowing he would be key to any arrangement with Moscow.
In April, Sullivan drafted a letter that Biden sent to Scholz laying out their formal proposal for the landmark prisoner exchange.
Meanwhile, Gershkovich remained in the Russian prison in which he had been imprisoned for more than a year awaiting trial on spurious espionage charges that US officials knew would have to take place before any deal.
Whelan had been in Russian jail since 2018 and had been passed over in previous swaps. Kurmasheva, a dual US-Russian citizen, had been detained in October 2023 and became another element in the prisoner swap negotiations.
Russian officials had been clear they would not carry out exchanges unless the prisoners were formally convicted in their legal system and the convictions of Gershkovich and Kurmasheva in separate, hasty trials on July 19 were seen by diplomats as a sign that a swap could proceed.
The final details of the deal then came together. On July 21, just an hour before Biden issued a statement that he would not seek re-election in November, he called Golob to finalise the pardon of the two Russians in Slovenian custody as part of the exchange.
Turkey’s intelligence service then arranged meetings between the parties exchanging prisoners, paving the way for the highly sensitive prisoner swap to take place on its soil.
“[We] did not take this decision lightly,” admitted Scholz’s spokesperson, Steffen Hebestreit.
“The state’s interest in enforcing the prison sentence of a convicted criminal was offset by the freedom, physical wellbeing and — in some cases — ultimately the lives of innocent people imprisoned in Russia and those unjustly imprisoned for political reasons,” he said.
Biden thanked Scholz personally for agreeing to include Krasikov in the swap.
Standing with family members of those released at the White House, Biden said: “I particularly owe a great sense of gratitude to the chancellor, the demands they were making of me required me to get some significant concessions from Germany which they originally concluded they could not do because of the person in question.”
“But everybody stepped up,” he added.
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