Russia and Western countries have released a total of 24 prisoners in the biggest swap since the end of the Cold War, officials said Thursday.
Here’s a snapshot of those who have been released:
liberated by russia
Russia has released 16 people – including American and German citizens, journalists and domestic dissidents:
Ivan Gershkovich:
The 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter became the first Western journalist to be jailed in Russia for espionage since the Soviet era. On July 19, a Russian court sentenced him to 16 years in a strict penal colony after a fast-track trial.
Russia says he spied on a tank factory in the Urals region and was working for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), but he has offered no evidence to support his claims, which the White House and his employer have dismissed as fabricated.
He was born in the US state of New Jersey to Soviet Jewish immigrants, and continued to visit Russia even as dozens of other Western journalists left following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Paul Whelan:
Former US Marine Whelan, 54, who holds British, Irish and Canadian nationality, has been in jail in Russia since December 2018.
In June 2020 he was sentenced to 16 years in a remote Russian penal colony for espionage.
He was detained in a Moscow hotel in 2018 allegedly with classified documents while he was security director at a US automotive parts maker.
Alsou Kurmasheva:
Kurmasheva, 47, an American-Russian journalist, was sentenced to six years and six months in prison on the same day as Gershkovitch in a highly confidential trial, details of which were not revealed until several days later.
Editor of the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty outlet, she was accused of violating Russia’s strict military censorship laws and was arrested while travelling from her home in Prague to Russia to see her ailing mother.
Vladimir Kara-Murza:
Fierce Kremlin critic and journalist Kara-Murza, 42, was sentenced to 25 years in prison in April 2023 for denouncing Moscow’s campaign in Ukraine, one of the longest prison terms ever handed down to a Putin critic.
He holds British-Russian dual citizenship, and was arrested in April 2022 following a speech in the United States where he accused Russia of “war crimes” against Ukraine.
A number of investigative media outlets, including Bellingcat, The Insider and Der Spiegel, have backed his claim that he was poisoned by security services on the orders of the Kremlin – leaving his nerves damaged.
In May he received a Pulitzer Prize “for his passionate columns on great personalities written while in prison.”
Oleg Orlov:
Orlov, 71, a veteran human rights lawyer, was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison in February after calling Russia a “fascist” state and criticising its Ukraine campaign.
Orlov, a biologist by training, was a key figure in the Nobel Prize-winning human rights organisation Memorial, which was dissolved by Russia in late 2021. Under his guidance, Memorial preserved the memory of the victims of communist repression and campaigned against rights abuses in modern Russia.
Lilia Chanysheva:
Chanysheva, 42, who once headed the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s offices in the central Bashkortostan republic, was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison in June 2023 for creating an “extremist organisation”, a sentence later extended to nine-and-a-half years in April.
As an accountant, he worked for major companies including Deloitte before joining Navalny’s team in 2017, and openly opposed corruption in the sector.
Ksenia Fadeeva:
In December 2023, Fadeyeva, 32, who led Navalny’s now-banned organisation in the Siberian city of Tomsk, was sentenced to nine years in prison for “extremism”.
Fadeyeva headed Navalny’s political office in Tomsk, where the opposition leader was poisoned ahead of the election in August 2020.
Fadeyeva was elected to the Tomsk city legislature in 2020, a move seen as a victory for the Russian opposition against President Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Ilya Yashin:
Russian liberal opposition politician Yashin, 41, was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison in late 2022 for condemning Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
A former ally of Navalny and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, he was jailed for condemning the “killing of civilians” in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.
Alexandra Skochilenko:
Skochilenko, a 33-year-old artist from St. Petersburg, was arrested in April 2022 and then jailed for seven years in November 2023 for defacing supermarket price tags with messages protesting the Ukraine invasion.
He focused particularly on the bloody battle for the Black Sea port city of Mariupol.
Andrei Pivovarov:
Pivovarov, a 42-year-old Russian opposition activist, was head of the Open Russia Foundation, funded by former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who himself spent a decade in prison for campaigning against Putin.
He was arrested in 2021, taken off a plane by FSB agents before he could leave the country, and sentenced to four years in prison for collaborating with an “undesirable” organisation.
Rico Krieger:
German citizen Rico Krieger, a 30-year-old doctor, was pardoned by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on 30 July after being sentenced to death on 24 June.
Convicted under six sections of Belarus’ criminal code in a secret trial, he was suspected of taking photographs of military sites in Belarus in October 2023 and placing explosive devices on a railway line near Minsk under Ukrainian orders.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Krieger worked as a physician for the German Red Cross and previously served as an armed security officer at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin.
Dieter Voronin:
Voronin, a joint Russian-German citizen, was sentenced to 13 years in prison on charges of “treason” after Moscow alleged he had obtained classified military information from another journalist, Ivan Safronov, who is still in prison.
Kevin Lick:
Lik, who was arrested at the age of 17 and is another joint Russian-German citizen, became the youngest person ever to be convicted of treason in Russia when he was sentenced in 2023 to four years in prison for sending photographs of a Russian military facility visible from his apartment window to German security services.
Patrick Schöbel:
Schoebel, a German citizen in his 30s, was arrested at St Petersburg airport earlier this year after customs officers found cannabis gummy bears in his luggage.
German Moyzes:
Moyzes, a Russian-German emigration lawyer, was arrested in St. Petersburg in May and charged with treason, according to Russian state media.
Almost no details of the case against him were made public. Moyzes was known in St. Petersburg as an urban activist and pro-biking campaigner.
Vadim Ostanin:
Ostanin, the former head of another regional branch of Navalny, was sentenced in 2023 to nine years in prison for participating in an “extremist” organisation.
liberated by the west
Under the agreement, the United States, Germany, Slovenia, Poland and Norway released a total of eight people, including alleged spies, murderers and hackers.
Vadim Krasikov:
Krasikov, an alleged FSB hitman, was sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany in 2019 for shooting dead a former Chechen separatist in a Berlin park.
German judges said the killing was ordered by the Russian state, and the Bellingcat investigative media outlet has linked Krasikov to a secretive elite unit of Russia’s FSB state security services.
Through his lawyer, Krasikov claimed he had been misidentified and was a Russian construction engineer. Earlier this year, Putin, without naming him, said he wanted to release from prison a Russian “patriot” who had “wiped out a bandit” in a “European capital.”
Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva:
Slovenia sentenced Dultsev and Dultseva, both 40 years old, to more than a year and a half in prison for “espionage and falsifying documents.”
The two, alleged Russian intelligence agents, were living secretly on Argentine passports in the capital Ljubljana, where authorities said they also ran an art gallery as part of their cover-up.
Mikhail Mikushin:
Mikushin, born in 1978, was arrested in Norway in 2022 and accused of posing as a Brazilian researcher at a university in Tromsø.
The Bellingcat investigative outlet said he was a colonel in Russia’s GRU military intelligence services and Norwegian media reported he did not speak Portuguese, Brazil’s national language.
Pavel Rubtsov:
The Polish intelligence agency alleged that Rubtsov, a Russian-born Spanish freelance journalist based in Spain, was an agent of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service.
Living under the name Pablo Gonzalez, he was arrested near the Polish border with Ukraine in February 2022, just four days after Russia launched the invasion.
He was born in Moscow but moved to Spain at the age of nine and acquired Spanish citizenship.
Roman Seleznev:
Seleznev, the son of a Russian lawmaker, was convicted of a number of cybercrimes in the United States, including a 27-year prison term for hacking card payment terminals to steal millions of credit card details.
US officials described his “criminal enterprise as … sophisticated and extensive, with international implications”. He was arrested in the Maldives in 2014 after being labelled a master hacker.
Vladislav Klyushin:
Klyushin, another Russian convicted of hacking crimes, was sentenced in 2023 to nine years in prison after he made nearly $100 million by hacking corporate systems and then illegally trading stocks using the collected information.
Vadim Konoshenok:
The US Justice Department says Konoschenok, who it alleges has “ties to the Russian FSB”, was a key figure in a scheme to provide US-made ammunition and electronics to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
