The Biden administration’s prisoner swap with Russia is being touted by the corporate press as “historic,” and in a way it is. Nothing like this, on this scale, has happened since the Cold War. But the swap is as lopsided as it is historic.
All Americans should welcome the release of our three unjustly imprisoned compatriots: Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine, and Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva. They were among the 16 western prisoners released by Moscow in exchange for eight Russian nationals released by the U.S. and allies.
But this wasn’t a Cold War-era prisoner swap of the kind immortalized in the Oscar-winning 2015 film “Bridge of Spies.” It was a dangerously uneven exchange that saw the release of a Russian assassin along with Russian spies and hackers, all of whom have committed serious crimes in western countries. Essentially, Moscow arrested a bunch of innocent western journalists and political dissidents, and then used them as bargaining chips to secure the release of its own killers, criminals, and spies.
Among the Russians released from western prisons, for example, was Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin who in 2019 killed a Chechen separatist commander in broad daylight in a park in central Berlin. Krasikov, who shot his victim twice with a Glock 26 and then threw it in a river, was sentenced to life in prison in 2021. At the time, German officials said he was a member of the F.S.B., Russia’s domestic spy agency.
Also released was suspected F.S.B. agent Vadim Konoshchenok, arrested in 2022 on espionage charges in Estonia and extradited to the U.S. He was accused of conspiring to obtain military-grade technologies from U.S. companies and pass them to Moscow.
The prisoner swap recalls the 2014 Bowe Bergdahl affair under the Obama administration. Bergdahl was a U.S. Army soldier who, disillusioned with the war in Afghanistan, abandoned his post in 2009 and was subsequently captured by the Taliban and held as a hostage. In 2014, the Taliban agreed to free him in exchange for five top Taliban officials being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including army chief of staff and deputy minister of intelligence. One of them, Abdul Haq Wasiq, is currently the head of intelligence for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the internationally unrecognized name of the Taliban regime.
Hellbound and Down 