Who is being freed in major international exchange
Details of some of the people from the United States, Russia and several other countries being freed in a major prisoner exchange, as named by US authorities:
US PRISONERS IN RUSSIA
* EVAN GERSHKOVICH: US journalist Gershkovich was arrested in March 2023 in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg and went on trial in June, accused of spying for the US Central Intelligence Agency to obtain secrets about a Russian company making tanks for the war in Ukraine. The Kremlin said he had been caught “red-handed”. He, his employer the Wall Street Journal and the US government all denied the charges. He was convicted on July 19 and sentenced to 16 years in jail on day three of a trial that was closed to the media on grounds of state secrecy
* PAUL WHELAN: A former US marine holding US, UK, Irish and Canadian citizenship, Whelan was arrested in Russia in 2018. He was convicted of espionage in 2020 and handed a 16-year sentence. He denied the charges. At the time of his arrest, Whelan was head of global security for BorgWarner, a Michigan-based car parts supplier. Russian investigators said he was a spy for military intelligence and had been caught red-handed with a computer flash drive containing classified information.
* ALSU KURMASHEVA: A Russian-US journalist for US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Kurmasheva was sentenced to six and a half years in prison on July 19, the same day as Gershkovich. She was convicted for violating Russian laws on “military fakes” in connection with a book she edited about Ukraine. RFE/RL has called Kurmasheva’s case a “a mockery of justice”.
GERMAN PRISONER IN BELARUS
* RICO KRIEGER: Krieger had been sentenced to death in Belarus on terrorism charges and was pardoned on Tuesday by President Alexander Lukashenko, an ally of the Kremlin.
RUSSIANS JAILED ABROAD
* VADIM KRASIKOV: Krasikov is a Russian citizen who was serving a life sentence in a German prison for murdering an exiled Chechen-Georgian dissident in a Berlin park in 2019. A German judge accused Russia of state terrorism, saying the order to kill must have come from President Vladimir Putin himself. Russia contests the judge’s interpretation. In a February interview with US journalist Tucker Carlson, Putin hinted that Krasikov was the Russian prisoner he wanted swapped for Gershkovich, referring to a person who “due to patriotic sentiments, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals”.
* ROMAN SELEZNEV: The son of a Russian MP, Seleznev was found guilty by a US federal court in Washington state in 2016 of perpetrating a cyber assault on thousands of US businesses that involved hacking into point-of-sales computers to steal credit card numbers, resulting in $US169 million ($A260 million) in losses. He was sentenced in 2017 to 27 years in prison, the longest ever hacking-related sentence in the US. That same year Seleznev pleaded guilty to participating in a racketeering scheme in Nevada and conspiracy to commit bank fraud in the US state of Georgia and received a 14-year jail term for each, to run concurrently with the Washington sentence.
DISSIDENTS JAILED IN RUSSIA
* VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA: Kara-Murza is a Russian and UK citizen who was serving a 25-year sentence in a Siberian penal colony. He was convicted of treason last year in a case he compared to the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s, after he repeatedly condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine and called for foreign sanctions against Russia. Following the death of Alexei Navalny in February, he is the best-known dissident now imprisoned in Russia. He suffers from a nerve condition after surviving two poisoning attempts in the 2010s, and his supporters have voiced fears for his life. Although not a US citizen, he has connections to the United States – he advocated for the adoption of the Magnitsky Act imposing sanctions against individuals responsible for human rights abuses and was a pall-bearer at the funeral of Republican senator John McCain. Even from prison, he has published columns in the Washington Post, for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in May.
ILYA YASHIN: Yashin, 41, was jailed in December 2022 for eight and a half years on charges of spreading “false information” about the Russian army, part of a package of sweeping wartime censorship laws. He was convicted over statements he made on his YouTube channel about alleged war crimes by Russian forces in Bucha, 25km northwest of Kyiv, in the first weeks of the war in Ukraine. Having risen to prominence during a wave of anti-Kremlin protests in 2011-12, Yashin was elected head of a Moscow district council in 2017 but has been repeatedly blocked from standing for higher office. Yashin was an ally of the late Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony in February.
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