Exchange was negotiated over months by leaders in several countries
BY DAVID S. CLOUD AND LARA SELIGMAN
WASHINGTON—When Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich arrived at an Air Force base outside Washington late Thursday, it marked at least a partial vindication for President Biden’s beleaguered foreign policy in his waning months in office.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris greeted Gershkovich and two other Americans in a homecoming celebration at Joint Base Andrews. Hours earlier they were handed over in a multicountry prisoner swap with Russia painstakingly negotiated over months, sometimes by Biden himself, drawing on friendships and allies nurtured over decades.
The prisoner deal highlighted Biden’s long-espoused faith in allies, an approach that he has insisted would produce far greater foreign policy gains than former President Donald Trump’s constant attacks on America’s overseas friends. The approach has yielded fewer successes for the White House in war-ridden Ukraine and the Middle East in the past four years.
“Multiple countries helped get this done. They joined a difficult complex negotiation at my request,” Biden said, announcing the prisoner swap at the White House on Thursday, calling it “a feat of diplomacy and friendship.”
He hailed the contribution of U.S. allies and his relationships with foreign leaders— drawing an implicit contrast with Trump, who recently claimed he would free Gershkovich after the election without any concessions.
Lawmakers from both parties applauded the prisoner swap, though Trump didn’t, claiming in a social-media post without evidence that the deal might have included secret money payments: “Are we releasing murderers, killers, or thugs? Just curious because we never make good deals, at anything, but especially hostage swaps.”
Robert O’Brien, who served in Trump’s administration as the special envoy for hostage affairs and later as his final national security adviser, applauded that the prisoners can return to their families, but said the deal came at “a very heavy price.”
“Putin has shown that he has got the back of his arms dealers and his assassins and that improves his standing within the regime,” he said, referring to
Russian President Vladimir Putin. “It removes the risks for his operatives to go overseas in the West, kill people, take any kind of malign action and they know he will bring them home.”
O’Brien said the Trump administration never traded “terrorists or killers for innocent Americans” and “never paid a dime in ransom,” despite bringing 55 hostages home.
Several senior Republican lawmakers applauded news of the release, while expressing worries that the deal may embolden Putin. “I remain concerned that continuing to trade innocent Americans for actual Russian criminals held in the U.S. and elsewhere sends a dangerous message to Putin that only encourages further hostage taking by his regime,” said Republican Rep. Michael McCaul
(R., Texas), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The deal freed 16 people held by Moscow, including Gershkovich, fellow Americans Paul Whelan, a former Marine, and Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist for the U.S. governmentfunded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, as well as U.S. resident Vladimir Kara-Murza. Each had been convicted on charges in Russia that the U.S. called false or unjust.
In return, the U.S. and four other European countries returned eight Russians serving prison terms for espionage, murder and other crimes to Moscow—a deal worked out over months that U.S. officials described as one of the largest prisoner swaps ever.
Putin drove a steep bargain in negotiations, insisting on
the release of Vadim Krasikov, a convicted assassin employed by the Kremlin to kill a rival in the West who was serving a life sentence in Germany.
But Biden focused more on the contribution that U.S. allies made in putting the complex deal together. Thursday’s swap was negotiated by senior U.S., Russian, German and other European officials. It came together because of a confluence of interests, including Putin’s willingness to deal with a lameduck president, rather than wait until after the U.S. elections when the prospects for a trade would be less certain.
Biden personally worked on the Gershkovich deal with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, said Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national-security adviser. Harris met with both
Scholz and Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob separately with only a few aides present during the Munich Security Conference in February to urge both leaders to push the deal through, according to a White House official.
Germany’s decision to release Krasikov, a key Kremlin demand, was the linchpin of the agreement, Biden said, one that Scholz initially rebuffed.
For Biden, the release of the hostages is a rare clearcut success. He has fallen short on other major foreignpolicy goals, including halting the war in Gaza, restoring a nuclear deal with Iran and helping Ukraine expel Russia from its territory.
Sullivan said the deal’s complexity made it unlike any previous prisoner trade with Moscow. “There has never been an exchange involving this number of countries, this number of people changing hands,” he said. “The degree of complexity and number of participating countries in this exchange is unprecedented, not just in the post-Cold War era but in the history of U.S.-Soviet and U.S.-Russian relations.”
Since 2021, the Biden administration has brought home more than 70 such hostages from around the world, including Afghanistan, Myanmar, Gaza, Haiti, Iran, Russia, Venezuela and West Africa, Sullivan said. But securing the release of Americans detained in Russia has been “uniquely challenging” because of the Ukraine war and the deterioration in U.S.-Russia relations, he said.
After Russia sentenced Gershkovich to 16 years in prison in July, Trump vowed that he would get him out after the U.S. election “for no compensation.”
Asked Thursday if he had a response to Trump’s claim that he would free the hostages without giving up anything, Biden said: “Why didn’t you do it as president?”
Fonte: WSJ