Who is being freed in a major Russia-West prisoner swap?
Paul Whelan's sister, Elizabeth Whelan, Alsu Kurmasheva's relatives Pavel Butorin, Bibi Butorin and Miriam Butorin, and Evan Gershkovich's relatives Mikhail Gershkovich, Ella Milman Danielle Gershkovich and Anthony Huczek flank U.S. President Joe Biden as he speaks about the release of Americans detained in Russia during brief remarks from the White House in Washington, U.S., August 1, 2024. REUTERS/Nathan Howard
A total of 24 people were freed on Thursday (Aug 1) in the biggest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War.
The prisoners were flown to Türkiye's capital Ankara from Russia, the United States, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway and Belarus under the complex deal, the Turkish presidency said.
Who are the prisoners?
US PRISONERS IN RUSSIA
Evan Gershkovich
US journalist Gershkovich was arrested in March 2023 in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg and went on trial in June, accused of spying for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to obtain secrets about a Russian company making tanks for the war in Ukraine.
The Kremlin said he had been caught "red-handed".
He, his employer The Wall Street Journal and the US government all denied the charges.
He was convicted on Jul 19 and sentenced to 16 years in jail on day three of a trial that was closed to the media on grounds of state secrecy.
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Paul Whelan
A former US marine holding US, British, Irish and Canadian citizenship, Whelan was arrested in Russia in 2018. He was convicted of espionage in 2020 and handed a 16-year sentence. He denied the charges.
At the time of his arrest, Whelan was head of global security for BorgWarner, a Michigan-based car parts supplier. Russian investigators said he was a spy for military intelligence and had been caught red-handed with a computer flash drive containing classified information.
The US invariably referred to the cases of Gershkovich and Whelan side-by-side, saying both were being used as bargaining chips by Moscow. It designated both as "wrongfully detained", meaning it considered the cases politically motivated and was committed to trying to get them home.
Alsu Kurmasheva
A Russian-American journalist for US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Kurmasheva was sentenced to 6.5 years in prison on Jul 19, the same day as Gershkovich.
She was convicted for violating Russian laws on "military fakes" in connection with a book she edited about Ukraine.
RFE/RL has called Kurmasheva's case a "a mockery of justice" and the US embassy in Moscow has urged Russia to free her.
GERMAN PRISONERS IN BELARUS
Rico Krieger
Krieger had been sentenced to death in Belarus on terrorism charges and was pardoned on Tuesday by President Alexander Lukashenko, a top ally of the Kremlin.
RUSSIANS JAILED ABROAD
Vadim Krasikov
Krasikov is a Russian national who was serving a life sentence in a German prison for murdering an exiled Chechen-Georgian dissident in a Berlin park in 2019.
A German judge accused Russia of state terrorism, saying the order to kill must have come from President Vladimir Putin himself. Russia contests the judge's interpretation.
In a February interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson, Putin hinted that Krasikov was the Russian prisoner he wanted swapped for Gershkovich, referring to a person who "due to patriotic sentiments, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals".
Roman Seleznev
The son of a Russian lawmaker, Seleznev was found guilty by a US federal court in Washington state in 2016 of perpetrating a cyber assault on thousands of US businesses that involved hacking into point-of-sales computers to steal credit card numbers, resulting in US$169 million in losses.
He was sentenced in 2017 to 27 years in prison, the longest hacking-related sentence in the US.
That same year Seleznev pleaded guilty to participating in a racketeering scheme in Nevada and conspiracy to commit bank fraud in Georgia and received a 14-year jail term for each, to run concurrently with the Washington sentence.
DISSIDENTS JAILED IN RUSSIA
Vladimir Kara-Murza
Kara-Murza is a Russian and British national who was serving a 25-year sentence in a Siberian penal colony.
He was convicted of treason last year in a case he compared to the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s, after he repeatedly condemned Russia's war in Ukraine and called for Western sanctions against Moscow.
Following the death of Alexei Navalny in February, he is the best-known dissident now imprisoned in Russia. He suffers from a nerve condition after surviving two poisoning attempts in the 2010s, and his supporters have voiced fears for his life.
Although not a US national, he has connections to the United States - he advocated for the adoption of the Magnitsky Act imposing sanctions against individuals responsible for human rights abuses, and was a pall-bearer at the funeral of Republican senator John McCain.
Even from prison, he has published columns in the Washington Post, for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in May.
Ilya Yashin
Yashin, 41, was jailed in December 2022 for 8-1/2 years on charges of spreading "false information" about the Russian army, part of a package of sweeping wartime censorship laws.
He was convicted over statements he made on his YouTube channel about alleged war crimes by Russian forces in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha in the first weeks of the war in Ukraine.
Having risen to prominence during a wave of anti-Kremlin protests in 2011-12, Yashin was elected head of a Moscow district council in 2017, but has been repeatedly blocked from standing for higher office.
Like many other leading opposition figures, he was branded a "foreign agent" by the Russian government.
Yashin was a longtime friend and ally of the late Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony in February.
