Prisoner swap between Russia and the US
Moscow, August 1 (Hibya) - Russia and the United States are exchanging prisoners, Russia Today reported citing Fox.
According to the report, US journalist Evan Gershkovich, held in Russia on espionage charges, has been released by Moscow as part of a prisoner swap.
Gershkovich, a 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter, “is scheduled to return to the United States” on Thursday, Fox host Trace Gallagher said, citing Jennifer Griffin, the network's chief national security correspondent at the Pentagon. Griffin did not specify who else might be involved in the possible swap.
The news came after a plane used in the 2022 swap of businessman Viktor Bout and American basketball player Brittney Griner was seen flying from Moscow to Kaliningrad, according to the tracking website Flightradar24.
Meanwhile, the Slovenian broadcaster N1 published a report on the upcoming “larger prisoner swap” between Russia, the US, Germany and Belarus. It claimed that Artem and Anna Dulcevs, a Russian couple accused of espionage by Slovenia, could be included in the swap.
The lawyer for Paul Whelan, a former US Marine who was arrested in Moscow in 2018 on espionage charges and later sentenced to 16 years in a Russian labor prison, said he was unable to locate his client's whereabouts.
The son of Soviet immigrants, Gershkovich had built a career largely focused on Russia and Eastern Europe. In March 2023, he was detained in Ekaterinburg in central Russia and charged with espionage. Russian authorities said he was trying to gather classified information about a Russian defense company and was “caught red-handed.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed last year in an interview with conservative US journalist Tucker Carlson that Washington and Moscow were in contact about a possible prisoner swap, describing the dialogue as “not easy”. However, the Kremlin has consistently refrained from disclosing details of such talks, saying that such sensitive issues “like silence”.
Gershkovich was the first American journalist to be arrested on espionage charges since the end of the Cold War, highlighting the current geopolitical tensions between Moscow and Washington on many issues, including the Ukraine conflict. The last major prisoner swap took place in December 2022, when the US released Russian businessman Viktor Bout in exchange for Brittney Griner, a basketball player convicted in Moscow on drug charges.
Albania News Agency