Russia has freed American reporter Evan Gershkovich and Marine Paul Whelan, who were held in Russia. They will be exchanged as part of an international prisoner exchange.
Bloomberg reports this, citing informed sources.
They are now heading to destinations outside Russia. Meanwhile, prisoners in the United States and other countries – US allies – will return to Russia. Other details of the exchange are not yet known.
Flight tracking website Flightradar24 showed that a special Russian government plane, which was used for a preliminary prisoner exchange involving the United States and Russia, took off from Moscow for Kaliningrad, the Economist writes.
Meanwhile, Euronews writes that the plane with tail number RA-61727M was previously used, in particular, to exchange former Ukrainian MP and pilot Nadiya Savchenko, who was held in Russia.
Gershkovich and Whelan were convicted in Russia on charges of espionage. Both American citizens, as well as the US government, denied the charges against them.
Shortly before the exchange, Evan Gershkovich, a journalist for the American newspaper Wall Street Journal, received a 16-year prison sentence in Russia on these charges.
Earlier, Reuters also wrote that several oppositionists and opponents of the war in Ukraine had “disappeared” from Russian prisons. Human rights activists believed that this indicated preparations for a prisoner exchange between Russia and the West.
Also in May, CNN, citing sources, wrote that the US authorities were looking for “valuable Russians” in other countries to exchange for Gershkovich and Whelan.
Recall that Gershkovich was detained on March 30, 2023, in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg. The Russian FSB claimed that the journalist was allegedly acting on instructions from the American side and “collecting data constituting a state secret,” namely, about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.
PR specialist Yaroslav Shirshchikov, who accompanied Gershkovich in Yekaterinburg, said that the reporter had come to the city several weeks before his detention to write a story about the Wagner PMC and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The US State Department called the detention unlawful and called on Russia to release Gershkovich.
Paul Whelan, a corporate security executive from Michigan, was arrested in 2018 in Moscow, where he was attending a friend’s wedding. He was also accused of espionage.
In May 2020, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison, Reuters reported. In several interviews, Whelan said he felt “abandoned” by the US after he was excluded from the previous swap.
Prepared by: Nina Petrovich