(Reuters) -Russia’s sentencing of U.S. reporter Evan Gershkovich to 16 years in a strict-regime penal colony on Friday could pave the way for a prisoner swap with the United States.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he is open to the idea of a trade involving the Wall Street Journal reporter and that contacts have taken place with the United States, but the Kremlin says any deal can only be negotiated “in silence”.
Who are the Americans detained in Russia and who are the Russians held abroad whom Moscow would like to get back?
PRISONERS IN RUSSIA
EVAN GERSHKOVICH
Gershkovich was arrested in March 2023 in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg and went on trial last month, accused of spying for the U.S. 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 newspaper and the U.S. government all denied the charges. He was convicted on Friday on day three of a trial which was closed to the press on grounds of state secrecy.
RUSSIAN JAILED ABROAD WHO COULD BE SWAPPED
VADIM KRASIKOV
Krasikov is a Russian national 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 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”.
Germany has always declined to comment on reports that Russia might be seeking to swap Krasikov for Gershkovich, as it would involve releasing a prisoner convicted of murder on German territory for a U.S. citizen.
OTHER U.S. CITIZENS JAILED IN RUSSIA
PAUL WHELAN
A former U.S. marine holding U.S., 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 U.S. invariably refers to the cases of Gershkovich and Whelan side-by-side, saying both are being used as bargaining chips by Moscow. It has designated both as “wrongfully detained”, meaning it considers the cases politically motivated and is committed to trying to get them home.
ALSU KURMASHEVA
Kurmasheva is a Prague-based reporter for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a media outlet funded by the U.S. Congress and designated by Russia as a foreign agent.
A dual citizen of the U.S. and Russia, she was arrested in the Russian city of Kazan in October 2023, having arrived in May to visit her elderly mother. She was initially charged with failing to register as a foreign agent, which risks up to five years in prison. Investigators later opened a new case against her for spreading false information about the Russian army, which carries a sentence of up to 15 years.
DISSIDENT JAILED IN RUSSIA
VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA
Kara-Murza is a Russian and British national who is 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 U.S. 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.
OTHER RUSSIANS JAILED ABROAD
VLADIMIR DUNAEV
Dunaev is a Russian national who was sentenced by the United States in January to five years and four months in prison on cybercrime charges. He was accused of belonging to a gang that deployed a computer banking trojan and ransomware suite of malware known as “Trickbot” and was extradited from South Korea to Ohio in 2021.
ROMAN SELEZNEV
The son of a Russian lawmaker, Seleznev was found guilty by a U.S. federal court in Washington state in 2016 of perpetrating a cyber assault on thousands of U.S. businesses that involved hacking into point-of-sales computers to steal credit card numbers, resulting in $169 million in losses.
He was sentenced in 2017 to 27 years in prison, the longest ever hacking-related sentence in the U.S. 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.
(Reporting by Mark TrevelyanEditing by Philippa Fletcher)
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