New details emerged Friday on the largest prisoner swap since the Cold War, with the Kremlin acknowledging for the first time that some of the Russians held in the West belonged to its security services. Families of freed dissidents, meanwhile, expressed their joy at the surprise release of their loved ones.
While journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva and former Marine Paul Whelan were greeted by their families and President Joe Biden in Maryland on Thursday night, President Vladimir Putin embraced each of the Russian returnees at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, and promised them state awards and a “talk about your future.”
Among the eight returning to Moscow was Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin who was serving a life sentence in Germany for the 2019 killing of a former Chechen fighter in a Berlin park. German judges said the murder was carried out on orders from Russian authorities.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Friday that Krasikov is an officer of the Federal Security Service, or FSB — a fact reported in the West even as Moscow denied state involvement.
He also said Krasikov once served in the FSB’s special forces Alpha unit, along with some of Putin’s bodyguards.
“Naturally, they also greeted each other yesterday when they saw each other,” Peskov said, underscoring Putin’s determination to include Krasikov in the swap. Earlier this year, Putin stopped short of identifying Krasikov, but referenced a “patriot” imprisoned in a “U.S.-allied country” for “liquidating a bandit” who had killed Russian soldiers during fighting in the Caucasus.
Peskov also confirmed that the couple released in Slovenia — Artem and Anna Dultsev — were undercover intelligence officers commonly known as “illegals.” Posing as Argentine expats, they used Ljubljana as their base since 2017 to relay Moscow’s orders to other sleeper agents and were arrested on espionage charges in 2022.
Their two children joined them as they flew to Moscow via Ankara, Turkey, where the mass exchange took place. They don’t speak Russian, and only learned their parents were Russian nationals sometime on the flight, Peskov said.
They also didn’t know who Putin was, “asking who is it greeting them,” he added.
“That’s how illegals work, and that’s the sacrifices they make because of their dedication to their work,” Peskov said.
The returning Russians were given a hero’s welcome at the airport, with an honor guard and bouquets of flowers.
The decision by Putin, himself a former KGB agent, to greet them personally was described by Peskov as “a tribute to people who serve their country and who after very difficult ordeals, thanks to the hard work of many people, have been able to return to the Motherland.”
In all, two dozen prisoners were freed in the historic trade, which was in the works for months and unfolded despite relations between Washington and Moscow being at their lowest point since the Cold War after Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Moscow and its ally Belarus freed 16 people in the exchange — Americans, Germans and Russian dissidents — most of whom have been jailed on charges widely seen as politically motivated.
Among the dissidents released were Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Kremlin critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer serving 25 years on a treason convicton widely seen as politically motivated; associates of late opposition leader Alexei Navalny; Oleg Orlov, a veteran human rights campaigner; and Ilya Yashin, imprisoned for criticizing the war.
They were flown to Germany amid an outpouring of joy from their supporters and relatives — but also some shock and surprise.
In a phone call to Biden, Kara-Murza said he didn’t “believe what’s happening.” “I still think I’m sleeping in my prison cell in (the Siberian city of) Omsk instead of hearing your voice. But I just want you to know that you’ve done a wonderful thing by saving so many people,” he said in a video posted on X.
“God, it is such happiness! I cried so much when I found out. And later, too. And I’m about to cry again now, as well,” said Tatyana Usmanova, the wife of Andrei Pivovarov, another opposition activist released in the swap, writing on Facebook as she flew to meet him. Pivovarov was arrested in 2021 and sentenced to four years in prison.
Usmanova told The Associated Press she has had several short phone conversations with Pivovarov, who was in a hospital outside Cologne, and she also spoke to Kara-Murza.
“They were all cheerful, happy, joked a lot,” she recounted. “Those were very pleasant human conversations that I have missed so much over two, three years” that they have spent in prison.
Usmanova said that neither she nor Pivovarov knew about the exchange until the last minute — the opposition activist only realized what was happening when he saw fellow activists on the same bus to a Moscow airport.
He was due to be released from prison in September, having served his sentence, and when Usmanova learned some days ago that he had disappeared from his prison in northern Russia, she imagined both good and bad outcomes.
She started to suspect a possible swap when reports appeared about other prisoners missing from their facilities, she said, but only felt “good and clear” about an exchange when she heard his voice on the phone Thursday, telling her to fly to Germany.
Artist and musician Sasha Skochilenko, convicted last year of an anti-war protest, disappeared Monday night from a detention center in St. Petersburg, her partner Sophya Subbotina said on Telegram. Subbotina told AP on Tuesday that “Sasha simply disappeared and we don’t know where she is.” Prison officials said she probably was in Moscow.
Subbotina rushed to Moscow to check detentions centers but couldn’t find Skochilenko, who finally called her on Thursday from Ankara. She said she had not known she was part of a swap until it was well underway, Subbotina added.
Orlov, the 71-year-old co-chair of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights group Memorial, called his wife, Tatyana Kasatkina, from Germany on Friday and said he “still hasn’t processed that he ended up being so far from Russia,” the group quoted her as saying.
Orlov recounted to her that no one asked for his consent or explained why he was being moved from a detention center, and he only realized he was part of a swap when he got on a bus to the airport.
Memorial quoted Kasatkina as saying Orlov’s voice sounded “cheerful, joyful,” and that he asked her to thank everyone for supporting him.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.