Wall Street Journal confirms journalist Evan Gershkovich released from prison in Russia

Evan Gershkovich. Photo: WSJ

The Wall Street Journal has confirmed that its journalist Evan Gershkovich, wrongfully convicted in Russia for spying, has been released from captivity following what the publication referred to as the “largest and most complex East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War”.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Details: The WSJ reported that Gershkovich and several other US citizens got off a Russian aircraft at an airport in Ankara, the capital of Türkiye, on the afternoon of 1 August.

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In addition to Gershkovich, Russia released Marine Paul Whelan, journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a British-Russian dissident, alongside a number of other political dissidents.

Gershkovich, 32, was held in a pre-trial detention facility in Russia for over a year under drummed-up charges of espionage. He was then sentenced to 16 years in a maximum security prison in a closed three-day trial.

According to the WSJ, the prisoner swap was organised by the White House, American diplomats, and the CIA.

As part of this effort, US President Joe Biden called Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob on 21 July, just an hour before announcing his withdrawal from the presidential race, to request a pardon for two Russian spies to be included in the exchange.

CIA Director William Burns travelled to Türkiye last week to meet his counterpart there and finalise the logistics for the exchange, the WSJ said.

Background:

• On 1 August, the National Intelligence Organisation of Türkiye (MIT) said that the “most ambitious prisoner exchange in recent years” between Russia and Western nations took place in Ankara. The swap involved prisoners held in the US, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway, Russia and Belarus.
• As part of the exchange, Vadim Krasikov, a Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officer who had been serving a life sentence in Germany for the 2019 murder of a Chechen dissident in a Berlin park, was released in Germany, which caused disappointment in the German prosecutor’s office.

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