Before Gershkovich: Big prisoner swaps between enemies | Russia-Ukraine war

This week’s prisoner exchange between Russia and the West was a historic moment, the largest swap in post-Soviet times, involving 24 prisoners.

Behind-the-scenes negotiations had intensified in recent months with tricky concessions required by the United States, Russia, Germany and three other European nations as international tensions over the war in Ukraine peaked.

US President Joe Biden called the Ankara-brokered deal a “feat of diplomacy”.

Russia released 16 people, including US citizens Evan Gershkovich, a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, and Paul Whelan, a security executive and former marine.

In return, the West allowed eight prisoners to return to Russia, including Vadim Krasikov, sentenced to life in prison by a German court in 2021 for killing a former Chechen rebel in Berlin – allegedly on Moscow’s orders.

Does the swap augur a thawing of relations between Russia and the West, in particular over the former’s war on Ukraine? Not likely.

Asked if the negotiations with Moscow laid the groundwork for peace talks, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the White House did not see a link between the two interactions.

As can be seen in our recap of the biggest prisoner trades in recent history, disparaged by some as “hostage diplomacy”, swaps can often pave the way for future releases, but their significance is more often than not limited.

February 1962 | ‘Bridge of Spies’

The first major prisoner exchange between the Soviet Union and the US took place at the height of the Cold War on Glienicke Bridge, aka the “Bridge of Spies”, which is on the edge of Berlin and had marked the border between East Germany and West Berlin.

The deal saw KGB spy Rudolf Abel walk towards East Germany, crossing paths with US pilot Francis Gary Powers on his way to the West.

Abel, a British-born Soviet intelligence officer, had worked for the KGB in New York. He served four years of a 30-year prison sentence before being exchanged.

Powers was piloting a U-2 spy plane when his aircraft was shot down in 1960 over Russia’s Urals region. He parachuted to safety only to be captured by the Soviets and was later convicted of espionage.

The swap was a significant moment, offering a blueprint for future trades between the Soviets and their Western rivals.

But the Cold War would rumble on for nearly three more decades.

May 1985 | The Jibril Agreement

The Jibril Agreement between Israel and Palestine was named after Ahmed Jibril, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC).

Nearly a year in the making, this deal saw three Israeli soldiers who had been seized by the group in Lebanon exchanged for 1,150 prisoners – including Kozo Okamoto, a member of the Japanese Red Army (Nihon Sekigun) who participated in the 1972 Lod Airport (Ben-Gurion International Airport) attack.

While Jibril was a landmark agreement, it was by no means the biggest.

Just two years before, Israel had exchanged more than 4,500 Palestinian prisoners for six Israeli soldiers held prisoner by the Palestine Liberation Organization.

In 2011, Israeli Staff Sergeant Gilad Shalit was exchanged for 1,027 Palestinians, including Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, released after more than 20 years in prison and today considered one of Israel’s most wanted men for his role in the October 7 attacks that sparked Israel’s war on Gaza.

June 1985 | The biggest agent swap

This biggest trade of government agents in history takes us back to the Glienicke Bridge.

Marian Zacharski, a Polish former intelligence officer convicted of espionage against the US, was swapped alongside three other Eastern Bloc agents for 23 Westerners jailed for espionage in Warsaw Pact countries.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their roles as agents, the identities of the Western prisoners were not revealed. But one of the 23 identified himself as Gerhard Suss on West German television, saying he had spent 13 years in prison and he had been tortured by his jailers.

The swap came after three years of negotiations.

September 1986 | Journalist-spy exchange

In a case reminiscent of Gershkovich’s, Nicholas Daniloff, a correspondent for US News & World Report in the Soviet Union, was swapped for Gennadi Zakharov, an employee of the Soviet mission to the United Nations.

Daniloff had been arrested and accused of espionage by the KGB in 1986. He spent less than a month in jail before he was allowed to fly out of the Soviet Union without standing trial.

Then-US President Ronald Reagan’s administration believed he had been arrested in retaliation for the detention three days earlier of Zakharov in New York.

The two men were swapped after weeks of negotiations.

July 2010 | The ‘Illegals Program’ swap

In 2010, 10 Russian agents detained by the US were swapped for four prisoners held in Russia.

The Russian agents were part of the so-called Illegals Program, a sleeper agent network launched by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service during the Cold War and revived by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Unmasked by the FBI, members of the group included Anna Chapman, who had been working undercover in Manhattan real estate and who later attained celebrity status in her native Russia.

Russia released Sergei Skripal, a colonel in its Military Intelligence Service, who was convicted of high treason for working as a double agent for Britain.

Eight years later, Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were the subjects of an assassination attempt by poisoning in Salisbury, England. They survived, but the incident revealed how even after being exchanged, freed captives can at times remain in the line of fire of their former captors.

May 2014 | Bowe Bergdahl

In 2014, Afghanistan’s Taliban released US Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for five members of the armed group held at Guantanamo Bay. Bergdahl had been held prisoner by the Taliban for five years.

His release sparked fury among Republicans like then-Senator John McCain, who said at the time that the release of “wanted war criminals” in exchange for the soldier was a mistake.

Bergdahl was initially welcomed back home, but public opinion turned against him when it emerged that he had deserted the US army in 2009 and left his post in Afghanistan, which led to his capture. In 2017, Bergdahl pleaded guilty to desertion and was dishonourably discharged.

Former US President Donald Trump repeatedly alluded to the affair at the time, saying deserters should be shot.

April 2022 | Trevor Reed

A former member of the US Marines, Trevor Reed was arrested in Russia in 2019 for attacking a police officer, a charge he denied. He was released three years later in exchange for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot and aviation transport expert imprisoned in the US for drug smuggling.

The timing was noteworthy, coming two months after the start of the Ukraine war, when US-Russia relations were under considerable strain. Those negotiations set the template for continued back-channel talks between the US and Russia for swaps — culminating in this week’s landmark release of 24 prisoners.

After Reed’s release, Biden had said in a statement: “We won’t stop until Paul Whelan and others join Trevor in the loving arms of family and friends.”

December 2022 | Brittney Griner

Less than a year after Reed’s release, US basketball star Brittney Griner was exchanged for convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in a high-stakes swap that came amid worsening relations between Moscow and Washington over Ukraine.

Griner was detained in a Moscow airport with vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage. The player had a prescription in the US for medical marijuana, but cannabis is illegal in Russia. After 10 months in detention, she was released from one of Russia’s most notorious penal colonies.

The negotiations that led to the exchange – at one point the release of Krasikov and Whelan was also reportedly discussed — were complex. Griner and Bout were swapped at the Al Bateen Executive Airport in Abu Dhabi.

September 2023 | US-Iran deal

Iran and the US have a history of prisoner swaps dating back to the 1979 US embassy takeover and hostage crisis in Tehran after the Islamic Revolution.

Their most recent major exchange happened last year when the arch foes swapped five detainees each in a Qatar-mediated deal that saw the US agree to the release of nearly $6bn in Iranian oil money frozen by South Korea.

The Americans included businessmen Siamak Namazi and Emad Shargi and environmentalist Morad Tahbaz with the US saying they were all held at Tehran’s Evin Prison for political leverage.

The Iranians included Mehrdad Ansari, who had allegedly obtained equipment that could be used for military gear, and Reza Sarhangpour Kafrani, accused by the US of unlawfully exporting laboratory equipment to Iran. Tehran denied these charges.

The swap did not herald more amicable relations. Less than a month later, tensions between Iran and the US soared when the latter’s chief ally in the Middle East, Israel, launched its war on Gaza.