The German government has said it did not take the decision to release a jailed FSB hitman lightly, as it confirmed its involvement in a historic prisoner exchange between Russia and the west.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s spokesperson, Steffen Hebestreit, said the deal – involving the release of Vadim Krasikov, convicted in Germany for murder – had been arranged “in close and trusting cooperation with the United States and European partners”, making it possible “to secure the release of 15 people who were unlawfully detained in Russia and a German national [Rico Krieger] who had been sentenced to death in Belarus.”
Hebestreit said their liberation was “only possible by deporting Russian nationals with a background in intelligence who were in prison in Europe and transferring them to Russia”. He confirmed that among them was Krasikov, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany after murdering a Georgian citizen in a Berlin park.
“The German government did not take this decision lightly,” Hebestreit said. “The state’s interest in carrying out the prison sentence of a convicted criminal was weighed against the freedom, physical wellbeing and – in some cases – ultimately the lives of innocent people imprisoned in Russia and those unjustly politically imprisoned.
“Our duty to protect German nationals as well as solidarity with the USA were important motivations,” he said.
Krasikov, a high-ranking officer in the Russian secret service the FSB, was serving a life sentence in a German jail for the 2019 murder of an opponent of the Russian regime in a central Berlin park.
Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Georgian-born Chechen dissident registered as an asylum seeker in Germany, was shot dead in broad daylight by Krasikov. The assassin had entered Germany using false papers.
Sentencing Krasikov in 2021, the Berlin court called the killing “state-ordered murder”, a claim that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and the Kremlin denied.
The assassination sparked a diplomatic crisis involving the expulsion of two Russian envoys from the German capital.
Krasikov was long seen as a potential linchpin in securing the release of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and the former US marine Paul Whelan, who were both freed on Thursday.
Putin alluded to Krasikov in an interview with the rightwing US media personality Tucker Carlson in February, saying the release of Gershkovich could be secured in a prison swap involving a man whom he described as a “patriot” serving a life sentence in a “US-allied country” after being convicted of “liquidating a bandit”.
Krasikov’s name had reportedly surfaced as early as 2022 in the context of a potential cold war-style prisoner swap.
However, German government representatives had long resisted the overture, reportedly floated by US diplomats, given the severity of Krasikov’s crime and the independence of the justice system.
Berlin also remained tight-lipped in response to accusations earlier this year by Maria Pevchikh – a close ally of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in a Russian Arctic penal colony in February – that US and German negotiating partners had dragged their feet in two-year-long talks over his possible release in a swap in early 2023.
Hebestreit said on Thursday that Germany hoped all those freed today would “recover from their physical and psychological suffering, in the company of their family and friends”.
“Our thoughts go out to all those who are still imprisoned in Russia today for expressing their opinions and telling the truth about Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine,” Hebestreit said. “Their courage should be an example to all democrats.”
The German government called on Russia and Belarus to release “all other political prisoners who are being unjustly held”.
