Evan Gershkovich (L), Paul Whelan (centre R) and Alsu Kurmasheva (R) aboard a flight to the United States, 1 August 2024. Photo: US Government
The Kremlin confirmed on Thursday that Vladimir Putin had signed presidential pardons for 13 of the 16 individuals exchanged by Russia in the largest prisoner swap with the West to have taken place since the end of the Cold War.
Prisoners Paul Whelan, Kevin Lik, Evan Gershkovich, Demuri Voronin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Alsu Kurmasheva, Liliya Chanysheva, Vadim Ostanin, Ksenia Fadeyeva, Sasha Skochilenko, Ilya Yashin, Andrey Pivovarov and Oleg Orlov had all been recipients of presidential pardons, the Kremlin said.
Under the terms of the deal brokered with a group of Western governments, the Kremlin said it would be receiving eight freed Russian prisoners, which it named as Vadim Krasikov, Artyom Dultsev, Anna Dultseva, Mikhail Mikushin, Pavel Rubtsov, Roman Seleznyov, Vladislav Klyushin and Vadim Konoschenok.
Once the prisoner swap at Ankara Airport was complete, the Kremlin expressed its gratitude to Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko for his “gesture of goodwill” in pardoning German citizen Rico Krieger, who was sentenced to death in Belarus for terror offences last week.
The Federal Security Service, Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, called those who had been swapped “a group of individuals who acted on behalf of foreign interests to the detriment of Russia’s national security.”
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov warned the freed political prisoners against ever returning to Russia in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda Radio, though he did pointedly note that Russia “remains open to negotiations”, which he described as the “preferred way to resolve the Ukraine conflict."
Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev, who is well-known for his histrionic anti-Western rhetoric, said that those freed from Russian prisons would “now feverishly pick new names and actively masquerade under the witness protection programme,” adding that he wished “traitors to Russia would rot in a dungeon or die in prison” but that exchanging them had been necessary to bring “our own people” home.
