dpa
Berlin/Washington/Moscow
In a major prisoner exchange involving 26 detainees and several countries, two high-profile US citizens imprisoned in Russia were freed in exchange for a convicted Russian murderer sitting in a Berlin jail and others.
The exchange, announced on Thursday by Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) and later by US President Joe Biden, included Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and US marine Paul Whelan. Gershkovich and Whelan had been imprisoned in Russia. The reporter was recently sentenced to 16 years in prison on espionage charges, following his detention last year on a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg. Whelan has been held in Russian custody since 2018.
The exchange also included German national Rico K, who had been sentenced to death in Belarus for alleged involvement in a bomb attack and then pardoned. Among the Russians released were prominent Kremlin critics such as Vladimir Kara-Murtsa and Ilya Yazhin.
The exchange took place at the airport in the Turkish capital Ankara, MIT said.
In a statement on Thursday, Biden said "the deal that secured their freedom was a feat of diplomacy.” He said his administration will continue to work to free "all those wrongfully detained or held hostage around the world.” In Berlin, German government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit defended the release of convicted Russian murderer, Vadim K, who was serving a life sentence for killing an exiled Chechen in broad daylight in a central Berlin park in 2019 - on the orders of Russian state authorities. "The release was only possible because Russian citizens with intelligence backgrounds who were imprisoned in Europe were deported and transferred to Russia,” Hebestreit told reporters.
Russian President Vladimir Putin had previously said during an interview with US talk show host Tucker Carlson that he was open to a prisoner exchange involving Vadim K. In return for the transfer of Vadim K and another nine individuals previously detained in the US, Norway, Poland, and Slovenia, 16 Western citizens and Russian opposition figures were freed.