The release of journalists and dissidents is good news—but the grubby reality is that the Russians have engaged in successful hostage-taking.

Russia and its junior partner, Belarus, have agreed to a prisoner exchange with the United States and Germany. The deal includes the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, the retired U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, and the Russian-British journalist and Kremlin opponent Vladimir Kara-Murza among the people who are being released after arrests and convictions on various charges. Some Russian dissidents, including allies of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny—who himself died in a Russian prison—were also freed and allowed to leave the country.

The Russians, for their part, are going to get their usual basket of criminals, including Vadim Krasikov, a colonel in the Russian intelligence services who was sentenced to life in a German prison after carrying out a Kremlin-ordered hit on a Russian dissident in Berlin. Moscow’s shopping list also reportedly includes a Russian money launderer now in an American prison and two Russian spies caught in Slovenia.

The size of this deal is significant. During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union exchanged spies quietly and in small numbers. One of the largest exchanges of the Cold War occurred in 1985, when 25 East German political prisoners were traded for three Soviet spies and one Polish agent. The largest after the Cold War involved 10 deep-cover Russian spies living in America who were arrested by the FBI in 2010 and then traded back for four prisoners from Russia.

The obvious question is why the Russians are making this exchange now, and releasing such a large number of prisoners.

Today’s exchange is not a deal to trade professional intelligence officers as part of some romantic Cold War drama. No one is going to do a Bridge of Spies walk to freedom. (The hostages were flown to Ankara, where both sides agreed to meet and trade their prisoners.) The grubby reality is that the Russians have engaged in successful hostage-taking: They have arrested people on minor or trumped-up charges, and then agreed to free them in return for some very bad people the Kremlin wants to bring back to Russia. Krasikov, for one, will likely come home to “a hero’s welcome,” according to the investigative journalist Christo Grozev (who was reportedly involved in the negotiations). It’s that simple.

The likeliest explanation for why the Russians are doing this now is that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his advisers believe the math finally works in their favor. They grabbed people and placed them, one by one, like slabs of meat on a scale until the West offered enough in return to tip the balance and make the deal worth Moscow’s time. The Russians tried to get Krasikov back after they arrested the WNBA star Brittney Griner, CNN reported, but the United States on its own could not offer a prisoner held in Germany. This time, however, the Russians threw a hapless German citizen into the mix (he was arrested for possession of cannabis gummies) along with the more prominent detainees.

Prisoner swaps always serve at least two Russian purposes, no matter when they take place. One is to show the world that the West, like Russia, trades in flesh. When the media call such deals “prisoner exchanges,” they are being accurate, but the term creates a veneer of equivalence: We have prisoners, they have prisoners, everyone makes deals. The fact that the West is holding Russian murderers and spies and Russia is holding Western journalists and basketball players is lost in the cold details of trading living human beings as if they weare heads of cattle or loads of lumber.

But more important—and more dangerous—is the fact that every successful hostage deal is a signal from Putin to the people who do his bidding overseas that he will rescue them if they are caught. In the old American television series Mission: Impossible, U.S. agents were warned that if they were captured or killed, the government “would disavow any knowledge” of their mission. In these prisoner swaps, Putin is affirming the opposite, telling his spies that he never forgets those who serve him and that he will do whatever it takes to get them home.

Putin’s grisly motives are no reason to refuse such deals. Democracies care about the lives of their citizens and should do everything they can to bring innocent men and women back to their families. But the ugly reality is that when the Kremlin springs someone like Krasikov, Putin is telling Russian agents and hired hit men everywhere that they should do their duty with full confidence that Russia will save them from the consequences of their crimes.

Deals like this take weeks, months, even years to negotiate, and no one should try to tie this deal too closely to American politics. The Russians, despite their constant attempts to interfere with U.S. elections, don’t operate on the same timetable as the Republicans or the Democrats. They don’t much care if the deal will be spun as a win for President Joe Biden or whether it undermines Donald Trump’s claims that only he could have freed Gershkovich. To the Kremlin, all of this is just noise; if anything, it probably decided to pick the fruit of a deal when it was ripe rather than wait for a new administration of either party.

Americans and their friends in Europe, including among the Russian opposition, have every reason to celebrate today’s releases. But make no mistake: The Kremlin is getting what it wants. And any Westerners who set foot in Russia should always understand that they could be the next bargaining chips for some future deal.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/russia-prisoner-swap-evan-gershkovich/679324/