WASHINGTON - A plane carrying detainees released by Russia landed in the United States late on Thursday at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, media footage showed.
Russia freed US journalist Evan Gershkovich and ex-US 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 US 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.
The exchange was the biggest prisoner swap since the Cold War. In the last major exchange in 2010, 14 prisoners were exchanged.
In December 2022, Russia traded US basketball star Brittney Griner, sentenced to nine years for having vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage, for arms dealer Viktor Bout, serving a 25-year sentence in the US.
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich stands inside an enclosure for defendants during a court hearing in Yekaterinburg, Russia on July 19. (Photo: Reuters)
Murderer part of deal
Among those included in Thursday’s swap was Vadim Krasikov, a colonel in the Russian FSB security service serving life in Germany for murdering an exiled Chechen-Georgian dissident in a Berlin park, whom President Vladimir Putin had indicated he wanted back.
Rico Krieger, a German sentenced to death in Belarus on terrorism charges, was pardoned on Tuesday by President Alexander Lukashenko, a close Putin ally. He was also among those released, along with Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin, Turkey said.
Reuters footage showed a Russian government plane on the ground in the Turkish capital Ankara.
Whelan and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian-British dissident, both jailed in Russia, had suddenly disappeared in recent days, according to their lawyers. At least seven Russian dissidents had been unexpectedly moved from their prisons.
A lawyer for Alexander Vinnik, a Russian held in the United States, declined on Wednesday to confirm the whereabouts of his client to the state RIA news agency “until the exchange takes place”.
RIA had also reported that four Russians jailed in the United States had disappeared from a database of prisoners operated by the US Federal Bureau of Prisons. It named them as Vinnik, Maxim Marchenko, Vadim Konoshchenok and Vladislav Klyushin.
Dissidents inside Russia whose supporters say they have been told that they have been suddenly moved in recent days include human rights activist Oleg Orlov and Daniil Krinari, convicted of secretly cooperating with foreign governments.
In the West, the dissidents are seen by governments and activists as wrongfully detained political prisoners. All have, for different reasons, been designated by Moscow as dangerous extremists.
A Slovenian court on Wednesday sentenced two Russians to time served for espionage and using fake identities, and said they would be deported, the state news agency STA reported, a move a Slovenian TV channel said was part of the wider exchange.