The Wall Street Journal reporter and former U.S. marine had both been imprisoned on espionage charges.
was preparing to free high-profile prisoners, though it remained unclear exactly who would be freed—and who the Kremlin would want in return. The full details of the deal to free Gershkovich and Whelan have not been made immediately available.in a maximum-security penal colony after being convicted on espionage charges.
He was arrested by Russia’s FSB security service in March 2023 during a reporting trip to the eastern city of Yekaterinburg and accused of gathering secret information about a Russian tank factory on behalf of the CIA. Theand the Biden administration vehemently denied the allegations, accusing Russia of conducting a sham trial.
Whelan, meanwhile, was detained in Moscow in 2018 and similarly sentenced in 2020 to 16 years’ imprisonment after his conviction on contested espionage charges. He figured in the last U.S. prisoner swap with Russia, in December 2022, in which WNBA starAt the time, U.S. officials said Russia would not consider including Whelan in the deal.
Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist involved in the negotiations for the new swap deal, told The Daily Beast on Wednesday the arrangement is “bittersweet.” On the one hand, he said, the deal freed people “who were rotting away in Russian prisons on insane charges,” while simultaneously rewarding Putin’s belief that “as long as he hoards ‘swap capital’ he will always be able to get his killers, hackers, and spies back.
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