Russia-US prisoner swap: Biden hails relief of returning Evan Gershkovich

Welcome to The Independent’s live blog. The largest US-Russia prisoner swap since the Cold War could take place today, with jailed journalist Evan Gershkovich, Briton Vladimir Kara-Murza and former US Marine Paul Whelan set to be released.

It comes after a series of mysterious movements of prominent Western prisoners prompted speculation that Vladimir Putin had agreed to swap them for Russians held in the West.

Flight tracking site Flightradar24 showed that a special Russian government plane used for a previous prisoner swap, involving the United States and Russia, had flown from Moscow to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

Follow our live updates for more.

The prisoner swap between Russia and the West is set to be the biggest exchange since the Cold War, with Moscow preparing to release between 20 and 30 political prisoners.

The largest exchange since then took place in 2010, which involved 14 people. In 2022, US basketball player Brittney Griner was swapped for a Russian arms dealer serving a 25-year sentence.

Jailed Briton Vladimir Kara-Murza could be released as part of the deal, as well as former US Marine Paul Whelan who has been detained since 2018.

Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin strategist with strong links to the Russian government, has claimed that Russia and the US have completed their prisoner exchange.

“The exchange of agents took place. The exact lists are not yet known,” he said on Telegram. “On the Russian side, these are honest officers. On the American side, these are political figures who worked in the interests of the United States.”

The Kremlin has still declined to comment on heightened speculation that a prisoner swap including Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich is being carried out.

After the death of Alexei Navalny, jailed British-Russian opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza became the face of anti-Kremlin resistance.

The 42-year-old University of Cambridge graduate was arrested in April 2022 hours after CNN broadcast an interview in which he said Russia was being run by a “regime of murderers”.

A year later, he was sentenced to 25 years in a Siberian penal colony in the Omsk region, where he now resides in a punishment cell only three metres long and one-and-a-half metres wide, nearly 6,000 miles from his wife and children living in the US.

Former US Marine Paul Whelan, has been in Russian custody since he was arrested just after Christmas in 2018 on what American officials have described as bogus spying charges.

He had travelled to Russia several times on business prior to his arrest by the FSB at a Hotel Metropol Moscow on 28 December 2018.

He was accused of taking delivery of a USB drive containing security-sensitive information and formally charged with espionage offences on 3 January, which Mr Whelan strongly denied.

Held at Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, he was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in prison on 15 June 2020.

Appearing in court, Evan Gershkovich would often crack a smile or laugh for the cameras from inside the glass-walled cage he was being held in. On another occasion he made a heart shape with his hands and put it to his chest. A message to family, friends and the wider world that the trumped up espionage charges for which he was handed a 16-year sentence would not break him.

It is a fate he had seen many times, dissidents, critics and journalists jailed – but one that increased significantly in the wake of Vladimir Putin‘s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022. Gershkovich tweeted in July 2022 that summer that it had become “a regular practice of watching people you know get locked away for years.” Less than a year later he was in prison himself, becoming the first US journalist to be accused of spying in Russia since the Cold War.

The 32-year-old was detained for just doing his job, a reporting trip for his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), to the city of Yekaterinburg – around 900 miles east of Moscow. A day later he was pictured being taken inside a Moscow courthouse, flanked by security personnel, wearing a mustard coat, its hood over his head.

Russian-American radio journalist Alsu Kurmasheva is said to be the third US citizen who will be freed in the prisoner exchange with Russia soon, according to a senior Biden administration official

Ms Kurmasheva will be released alongside Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and Marine veteran Paul Whelan, the official confirmed to CBS News.

Russia’s main prize in exchange for Mr Gershkovich was expected to be Vadim Krasikov, an FSB assassin who was sentenced to life in prison in Germany over the murder of a Chechen-Georgian former rebel fighter in Berlin’s Tiergarten park in 2019.

Five Russians in jail in the United States were mooted as others to be swapped in the deal after they reportedly disappeared from the Federal Bureau of Prisons database.

They include Vladislav Klyushin, a Kremlin-linked businessman who was serving nine years in the US on hacking and insider trading charges.