The Biden administration’s prisoner swap with Russia is being touted by the corporate press as “historic,” and in a way it is. Nothing like this, on this scale, has happened since the Cold War. But the swap is as lopsided as it is historic.
All Americans should welcome the release of our three unjustly imprisoned compatriots: Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine, and Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva. They were among the 16 western prisoners released by Moscow in exchange for eight Russian nationals released by the U.S. and allies.
But this wasn’t a Cold War-era prisoner swap of the kind immortalized in the Oscar-winning 2015 film “Bridge of Spies.” It was a dangerously uneven exchange that saw the release of a Russian assassin along with Russian spies and hackers, all of whom have committed serious crimes in western countries. Essentially, Moscow arrested a bunch of innocent western journalists and political dissidents, and then used them as bargaining chips to secure the release of its own killers, criminals, and spies.
Among the Russians released from western prisons, for example, was Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin who in 2019 killed a Chechen separatist commander in broad daylight in a park in central Berlin. Krasikov, who shot his victim twice with a Glock 26 and then threw it in a river, was sentenced to life in prison in 2021. At the time, German officials said he was a member of the F.S.B., Russia’s domestic spy agency.
Also released was suspected F.S.B. agent Vadim Konoshchenok, arrested in 2022 on espionage charges in Estonia and extradited to the U.S. He was accused of conspiring to obtain military-grade technologies from U.S. companies and pass them to Moscow.
The prisoner swap recalls the 2014 Bowe Bergdahl affair under the Obama administration. Bergdahl was a U.S. Army soldier who, disillusioned with the war in Afghanistan, abandoned his post in 2009 and was subsequently captured by the Taliban and held as a hostage. In 2014, the Taliban agreed to free him in exchange for five top Taliban officials being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including army chief of staff and deputy minister of intelligence. One of them, Abdul Haq Wasiq, is currently the head of intelligence for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the internationally unrecognized name of the Taliban regime.
At the time, Obama was widely criticized for giving up so many high-value Taliban prisoners for Bergdahl and for negotiating with terrorists for his release. Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers accused him of desertion and endangering the lives of other members of his platoon who were tasked with finding him in enemy territory. He was later formally charged with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, to which he pled guilty and was subsequently dishonorably discharged.
Biden’s prisoner exchange with Russia isn’t as egregiously lopsided as the Bergdahl swap, but it nevertheless sends a clear message that a hostile regime can arrest and detain American citizens on false pretenses, using them as leverage to secure the release of their own people.
At the very least, it most assuredly wasn’t was the brilliant foreign policy maneuver the Biden administration and the media are saying it was. White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan got choked up announcing the prisoner swap on Thursday. He praised his colleagues at the NSC, CIA, and State Department that orchestrated the deal, adding that every American should be proud having such people “standing up on their behalf and on behalf of American security.”
Again, it’s good news that three American citizens were released, but it’s hard to make the case that the Biden administration stood up for “American security” or made America safer by agreeing to this deal.
It’s certainly not something an ailing Joe Biden should brag about, as he did at a press conference Thursday announcing the swap. Asked about former President Donald Trump’s comments that he could have secured the American prisoners’ release without giving up anything, Biden replied, “Then why didn’t he do it when he was president?” and then walked away, seemingly unaware that two of the three Americans released were arrested during his term in office, not Trump’s.
A grinning Dana Bash of CNN called it a “mic drop moment” without clarifying the facts or the timeline of the arrests — something we might once have associated with Russian state media but are now accustomed to seeing here in the U.S.
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