Prisoners leaving Russia
Evan Gershkovich
A Wall Street Journal reporter, Gershkovich became the first western correspondent to be arrested for espionage since the fall of the Soviet Union. Detained in March 2023 while on a reporting trip to Ekaterinburg, Russian authorities claim he was collecting information for the CIA, but have never made public any of their supposed evidence. Gershkovich, his newspaper and the US state department have all denied the charges. He was sentenced to 16 years in jail in July in a speedy, closed trial.
Paul Whelan
Arrested in 2018 on espionage charges, the former US marine has been in Russian prison since. Whelan, who also holds UK, Irish and Canadian citizenship, has always said the evidence against him was falsified. In a recent interview with the BBC, he said he spent his days stitching overalls and hats in a prison factory, and that his barracks were mouldy and unheated.
Late last year, Whelan’s family said he had been hit in the face by another prisoner, breaking his glasses.
Alsu Kurmasheva
A 47-year-old editor for Radio Liberty, based in Prague, Kurmasheva is a joint US-Russian citizen. She was arrested last year during a family visit to the city of Kazan, and accused of failing to register as a “foreign agent” and for spreading “false information” about the country’s armed forces, under harsh censorship laws enacted after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Ilya Yashin
Yashin is one of Russia’s best-known opposition leaders, a longtime ally of Boris Nemtsov, who was killed in 2015, and Alexei Navalny, who died in prison earlier this year.
In an interview last year with the Guardian, written from prison, Yashin said he had stayed in Russia rather than emigrate because he felt that after the invasion of Ukraine it was important to remain and speak out. “I understood that an anti-war voice should be speaking in Russia,” he said.
Oleg Orlov
A veteran of the Soviet-era dissident movement, 70-year-old Orlov is one of Russia’s most respected human rights defenders, and for the past two decades was one of the leaders of Memorial, an organisation that won a share of the Nobel peace prize in 2022. Orlov was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in jail earlier this year for criticism of the Russian army.
Sasha Skochilenko
A 33-year-old anti-war artist, Skochilenko was jailed for seven years late last year after she replaced price tags in a St Petersburg supermarket with anti-war messages. Amnesty International declared her a prisoner of conscience.
Vladimir Kara-Murza
A 42-year-old longstanding opposition politician and activist, Kara-Murza has accused the Kremlin of trying to poison him twice, in 2015 and 2017. He was jailed for 25 years last year for his criticism of the war in Ukraine and for links with an “undesirable” organisation. His family said Kara-Murza, who has dual Russian-UK citizenship, had suffered health problems in prison, as an after-effect of the earlier poisonings.
Kevin Lik
Nineteen-year-old Lik is the youngest person to be convicted of treason in Russia. He was sentenced last December to four years in jail, apparently for emailing photographs to “representatives of a foreign state” at the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Lik is a German-Russian dual national; he was born in Germany but moved to Russia at the age of 12.
Rico Krieger
Unlike everyone else in the swap, Krieger was held in Belarus, not Russia. His case became public only in recent weeks, when it emerged he had been sentenced to death in the country, supposedly for carrying out a terrorist attack on the orders of Ukrainian intelligence. He appeared in an emotional interview on state television, begging for clemency and asking the German government to intervene. According to Belarusian authorities, the 30-year-old Krieger was arrested late last year after setting off an explosion in the country in which nobody was injured, though no evidence was presented publicly. On Tuesday, the Belarus president, Alexander Lukashenko, pardoned Krieger.
Ksenia Fadeyeva
An associate of the late Alexei Navalny in the Siberian city of Tomsk, Fadeyeva was with Navalny when he was poisoned with the novichok nerve agent in the city in 2020. She later won election to the municipal council. However, Russian authorities outlawed Navalny’s organisation in 2021, and last year Fadeyeva was sentenced to nine years in jail on charges of “organising an extremist group”.
Liliya Chanysheva
Chanysheva was another of Navalny’s regional coordinators, running his office in the city of Ufa. She was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison for organising an extremist community, and the sentence was extended by a further two years in April, after prosecutors said the initial sentence was too lenient.
Vadim Ostanin
Ostanin was another former coordinator of Navalny’s office in the Siberian city of Barnaul. In July 2023, he was sentenced to nine years in a penal colony on charges of extremism.
Andrei Pivovarov
Pivovarov is a Russian opposition politician who served as the head of Open Russia, which was outlawed in 2021. In 2022, Pivovarov was convicted of carrying out activities of an “undesirable” organisation and was sentenced to four years in prison.
Dieter (Demuri) Voronin
Voronin is a dual Russian-German national, and a political scientist. In March 2023, he was sentenced to 13 years and three months in prison on charges of state treason. He was implicated in the case of Russian journalist Ivan Safronov, who was accused of state treason for passing classified information to foreign nationals and sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2022. Safronov’s lawyers have said he was only using publicly available information in his work.
Patrick Schöbel
Schöbel is a German national who was arrested earlier this year at Pulkovo airport in St Petersburg in February when gummies containing cannabis were allegedly found in his possession. He had been detained since and was facing drug-smuggling charges, the outlet said.
German Moyzhes
Moyzhes is a dual Russian-German national, and a lawyer who had been helping Russians obtain residence permits for countries in the EU including Germany. He was arrested in May this year in St Petersburg, and accused of committing state treason. His trial was still pending.
Prisoners returning to Russia
Vadim Krasikov
Vladimir Putin had long indicated Krasikov as his number one demand in any swap. He was arrested in 2019 after shooting dead the Chechen exile Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in broad daylight in a Berlin park. Believed to be a former FSB officer, Krasikov travelled to Germany on a false identity. German authorities believe the assassination was an officially sanctioned mission – a Berlin court called the hit “a state-ordered murder”.
In his interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year, Putin described Krasikov as “a person who eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals, due to patriotic sentiments”.
Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva
The pair were “illegals” – deep-cover Russian spies who are dispatched abroad on long-term missions that can last decades, posing as foreigners. Artem and Anna pretended to be a married Argentinian couple named Maria Meyer and Ludwig Gisch, a gallerist and IT entrepreneur respectively. They lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia, with their two children, from where they are believed to have carried out tasks for Russian intelligence across Europe. When they were arrested in late 2022, a source told the Guardian there was so much cash found in their office that it took “hours to count”.
Their two minor children are also believed to have been included in the swap. The two had been taken into foster care after their arrest and continued to attend school in Ljubljana.
Mikhail Mikushin
Another Russian illegal, Mikushin was arrested in Norway, where he used the Brazilian identity of José Assis Giammaria. He was arrested in the northern Norwegian city of Tromsø, where he worked as a researcher at a university, ironically engaged in assessing hybrid security threats. He was due to stand trial in September.
Vladislav Klyushin
A Russian businessman with ties to the Kremlin, Klyushin, 43, was sentenced in September 2023 by a court in Boston to nine years in prison for his role in a $90m insider-trading scheme involving hacked secret earnings information about multiple companies. Klyushin, the owner of a Moscow-based IT company that worked with the Russian defence ministry, was one of the highest-profile Russians in US custody.
Roman Seleznev
The son of a Russian Duma deputy, Seleznev, 40, was arrested on holiday at an airport in the Maldives in 2014 and sentenced three years later in Washington to 27 years in prison, the longest-ever hacking-related sentence in the US. Seleznev, known by his hacker name Track2, was accused by a US court of perpetrating a cyber-assault on thousands of American businesses resulting in $169m in losses.
Vadim Konoshchenok
Konoshchenok, 49, was arrested over a scheme to export American-made technology intended for use by Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. Initially detained in Estonia and later transferred to the US, Konoshchenok was alleged to be involved in the “Serniya Network” conspiracy. This network, comprising seven Russians and Americans, was implicated in illegally sourcing and shipping millions of dollars in western military hardware to Russian military contacts.
Pablo González/Pavel Rubtsov
A dual Spanish-Russian national, González was a journalist who had worked for many years for Spanish publications, frequently in Russia and Ukraine. He was arrested in Poland, near the border with Ukraine, in March 2022 and has been held in jail in Poland since, accused of being a Russian spy. Polish officials said he worked for GRU military intelligence, using cover as a journalist to travel the world and gain access to conflict zones. Poland had been criticised by press freedom groups for not making any evidence against him public, and Gonzalez had denied the charges.
