Inside the Secret Negotiations to Free Evan Gershkovich Inside the Secret Negotiations to Free Evan Gershkovich

Across Europe, planes were ferrying the other human pieces of a fragile puzzle: among them, two other Americans and eight Russians who had together served decades in political prisons and penal colonies. They ranged from hardened dissidents who had braved poisoning and hunger strikes to ordinary Americans who found themselves reduced to bargaining chips in a yearslong geopolitical tug of war with Vladimir Putin.

The price for their freedom was being flown in handcuffs and a bulletproof helmet from Germany on a Gulfstream jet, landing near the Turkish VIP terminal where Russia would collect him. Vadim Krasikov was a professional hit man who had gunned down an exile in broad daylight in a Berlin park. He was the man the Russian president wanted to bring home. 

“The Russian Federation will not leave me to rot in jail,” the murderer once told a guard.

For 16 months, Ella Milman had studied the assassin’s case, daunted that such a man could be the key to unlocking her son’s freedom. She was one of an extraordinary cast of characters who worked in the shadows to advance the swap. Her son’s fate rested not just on messages ferried by diplomats and spies, but years of secret interventions drawn from the ranks of prime-time TV hosts, Silicon Valley billionaires and Russian oligarchs. An unlikely duo of Tucker Carlson and Hillary Clinton had each played walk-on roles to propel talks forward.

At the center of the struggle were the U.S. and Germany, two allies grappling with the moral and strategic calculus of freeing guilty prisoners to bring their innocent citizens home. If the U.S. once claimed a “no concessions” policy, that principle has been steadily eroded by one precedent after the next. To respond to Putin and other hostage-taking autocrats, the State Department staffed an entire office of roughly two dozen personnel, led by a former Green Beret who jetted around Europe and the Middle East to explore prisoner trades that might free Gershkovich and others.

Somehow along the way, a mother living in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia found herself stuck between the two most powerful governments in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance, ferrying messages that she hoped could free her son. 

While Gershkovich was just released on Thursday morning, the Journal has been reporting on his fate from the moment he was seized. This account is based on more than a year of interviews with dozens of U.S., Russian, European and Middle Eastern national security officials, diplomats, spies, and prisoners’ families. Reporters reviewed classified Russian legal documents, security camera footage from arrests and unpublished photos of previous prisoner swaps to identify key players in the drama. A Journal reporter was on-site in Ankara to watch as Gershkovich stepped out into freedom.

Journal reporters were also, unavoidably, part of the story, followed through the streets of Vienna and Washington and, in one case, summoned for questioning by Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB. Reporters crisscrossed Western capitals, sitting with intelligence officials who insisted that no electronic devices be brought into the meetings and in some cases, communicating through handwritten notes to avoid leaving a data trail. 

The newspaper had, in fact, been investigating the story of Russia’s hostage-taking spree since early 2023, when its Russia correspondent Evan Gershkovich encouraged his colleagues to investigate Putin’s brazen strategy of seizing Americans on spurious charges and trading them as hostages. “It’s totally undercovered,” he said then.

Read More (...)