- These prisoners were exchanged
In a prisoner exchange between Russia and Western states, numerous inmates have been released. The German Press Agency has named the first names:
"Tiergarten Murderer" Wadim K.
Wadim K. spent more than a year on the defendant's bench at the Berlin Regional Court. On December 15, 2021, the judges sentenced the Russian to life imprisonment for the murder of a Georgian in the Berlin park Kleiner Tiergarten on August 23, 2019. The court was convinced that the masterminds behind the murder were in Russia. The Georgian had been in the sights of the Russian Federation for a long time because he had led a militia in the fight against Russia for several years during the Second Chechen War. Russian President Vladimir Putin later publicly referred to the murder victim as a "bandit", "murderer", and "bloodthirsty person".
The Russian initially claimed through his lawyers at the beginning of the trial in October 2020 that he was called Wadim S., 50 years old, and a civil engineer. A false identity, according to the judges. Wadim K. had traveled to Berlin as a tourist the day before the crime. The now 58-year-old accepted the verdict at the time without reaction. He waived his right to appeal. Later, the "Tiergarten Murderer" was moved several times between high-security prisons in Berlin due to security concerns and was last imprisoned in Offenburg, Baden-Württemberg, according to dpa information.
Evan Gershkovich
The 32-year-old US reporter Evan Gershkovich was sentenced to 16 years of strict camp imprisonment in a controversial trial in mid-July, accused of alleged spying. The Russia correspondent of the US magazine "Wall Street Journal" was arrested by the Russian security service FSB at the end of 2023 in Yekaterinburg on the Ural while on a reporting trip. He was accused of collecting secret information about Russia's defense industry for US agencies. The "Wall Street Journal" denied this. Gershkovich was reportedly working on his job with an official accreditation.
The US government demanded the release of the journalist for months. Several US media withdrew their correspondents from Moscow after his arrest, fearing political persecution of their employees by the Russian state. Observers in Moscow already interpreted the swift conviction of Gershkovich as a possible sign that an agreement with the US side could soon be reached. According to Russian legal practice, a verdict must be in place before an exchange can take place.
Paul Whelan
The 54-year-old former US soldier Paul Whelan was sentenced to 16 years in a labor camp by a Russian court in June 2020 for alleged espionage. Before that, he had spent about a year and a half in detention. Whelan, who holds multiple citizenships, was allegedly caught red-handed by the FSB as a spy. He was said to have received secret data on a USB stick.
Whelan vehemently denied the charges and spoke of a politically motivated verdict. According to his defense, he believed that the data on the USB stick was private when he received it during one of his many visits to Moscow. He was arrested during a friend's wedding in Moscow. The US government repeatedly called for Whelan's release, citing a lack of evidence in the case. There were also concerns about his detention conditions. Whelan became seriously ill in pretrial detention and had to undergo emergency surgery.
The 30-year-old German was sentenced to death at the end of June in Belarus (formerly White Russia). The charge: mercenarism and terrorism, allegedly the German, a paramedic from Hildesheim, had been recruited by the Ukrainian SBU intelligence service as a mercenary. As Belarus is the last country in Europe to carry out the death penalty, concern was also high in the Foreign Office. Berlin criticized the handling of the case as "unbearable" after the man was paraded on state television and confessed to his crimes. During the broadcast, he begged dictator Alexander Lukashenko for clemency and the German government for help.
Lukashenko commuted the man's death sentence last Thursday following a meeting with investigators and his lawyer. The decision, portrayed by Minsk as a humanitarian gesture, was also seen as a sign of an impending prisoner exchange. Belarus had previously announced that it had made an offer to the German Foreign Office.
Ilya Yashin
The 41-year-old politician is one of the sharpest critics of Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin. Yashin remained in Russia when many other Kremlin opponents had already fled abroad. Because he condemned the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine and, above all, held the soldiers of his homeland responsible for the massacre of civilians in Bucha near the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, he was sentenced in December 2022 to eight and a half years in a labor camp for insulting the army.
"Putin is a war criminal, but I will remain behind bars," Yashin told the court. "Isn't that a funny situation?" He is also known for his political closeness to opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in a labor camp in the Arctic region in February, and to Boris Nemtsov, the former deputy prime minister who was shot near the Kremlin.
In the context of potential prisoner exchanges, it would be interesting to know if 'Tiergarten Murderer' Wadim K. could be included in future negotiations, given his life sentence for a high-profile murder. Additionally, the release of Evan Gershkovich, the US journalist jailed in Russia, could be a significant topic in future exchanges, considering the international pressure on Russia regarding his case.
