American Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. marine Paul Whelan were released from imprisonment in Russia on Thursday as part of a prisoner swap deal, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The pair were freed after days of intense speculation that Russian President Vladimir Putin was preparing to release high-profile prisoners, though it remained unclear exactly who would be included in the deal—and who the Kremlin would want in return. The full details of the arrangement to free Gershkovich and Whelan have not been made immediately available.
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The deal is expected to include “a number of Americans,” a source told CNN, with a senior administration official telling the network that prisoners are expected to be in U.S. custody soon.
Bloomberg separately cited a European official in reporting that Vladimir Kara-Murza, a British-Russian dissident, would be released. Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment in April 2023 on treason and other charges after speaking out against the war in Ukraine.
The release of Gershkovich comes the month after he was sentenced to 16 years 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. The Journal and 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 star Brittney Griner was exchanged for the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
At the time, U.S. officials said Russia would not consider including Whelan in the deal. President Joe Biden said Moscow was treating his case differently from Griner’s “for totally illegitimate reasons” but nevertheless vowed to “never give up” on bringing Whelan home.
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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