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President Joe Biden looks on as Evan Gershkovich, who was released from detention in Russia, is greeted by his mother Ella Milman, upon his arrival at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, on Aug. 1, 2024.
Did Moscow just open the diplomatic door?
They’re free! Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former US Marine Paul Whelan, journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, and Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza were released in a major prisoner swap between Russia and the West on Thursday.
President Joe Biden proudly addressed the nation about securing the release of 16 prisoners, including 12 foreigners, noting that it was a “feat of diplomacy.” The plane carrying Gershkovich, Kurmasheva, and Whelan landed at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland late last night, where they were greeted by a heartwarming scene with their families, Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris.
The less good news: Vadim Krasikov, a Russian imprisoned in Germany for murdering a former Chechen militant, also walked. But he’ll likely be stuck in Russia for the foreseeable future — so we won’t dwell on it.
Why now? Many assumed Vladimir Putin would avoid handing a clear win like this to Biden, or that the Kremlin would exact a bigger price in doing so. But instead, they’ve given up their highest-profile prisoners in exchange for 16 of their own in a politically advantageous win for the Biden-Harris administration. The swap was the result of months of complex negotiations and high-stakes diplomacy.
Still, we don’t know all the details. “We don’t know whether there were any quid pro quos that are not part of the public statements on all of this,” as Sam Greene, director for democratic resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis, points out. And as for Biden, he says, “Maybe giving him a win isn’t so important [to the Kremlin] anymore.”
But it still surprises Greene “that [the Russians] would take essentially their entire deck of trading cards and cash it in for at least what on the face of it is not a whole heck of a lot.”
Could this signal that Russia is willing to engage in broader diplomacy? Unlikely, says Tinatin Japaridze, a regional expert and analyst at Eurasia Group. “Even though some will interpret the latest move as a signal of potential Russian openness to hold constructive negotiations on Ukraine,” she says, “it is too soon to jump to those conclusions.”
Greene agrees that the swap is unlikely to have a big impact on the war, but he does see room for hope. It upends the Western narrative that there isn’t really a negotiating partner for diplomatic outreach in Moscow. While the prisoner swap didn’t involve anything else Moscow is otherwise fighting for — at least as far as we know — there is one bonus for Russia: “It does kind of send a message or can be seen to send the message that there is a negotiating partner in the Kremlin,” he says.
And Moscow may see this as a now-or-never moment, Greene says. Western F-16s are now landing in Ukraine, which improves Ukrainian capabilities, and the US election looks a little bit less likely to go the way Putin wants (read: for Donald Trump), while the Russians are making progress on the front lines but at a huge cost.
“So maybe they do want to send that signal,” says Greene.
We’ll be watching for any signs of Moscow’s willingness to negotiate.
Why Putin agreed to the US-Russia prisoner swap
Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden and co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, shares his perspective on European politics from the Adriatic Sea.
What does the biggest prisoner exchange in decades tell us about Putin?
First, the huge prisoner exchange, the biggest that we've seen for decades. I think it's important to note that it exposes the nature of Russia and the West, because on the one side, Putin was desperate to get back convicted killers, murderers, and failed spies. I think that was very important for him in order to perhaps improve their other sacking morale of his security and intelligence services after significant setbacks that they've been suffering over the last few years, and then I think the success of securing the release of journalists, brave journalists, and brave defenders of freedom and democracy in Russia. I think it is a good day, both for the individuals, needless to say, that have been gotten their freedom, and also for the fact that it does expose the very difference of nature between Russia and the West.
What's the European reaction to what's happening in the Middle East?
Well, deep apprehension. The fact that it's not been impossible to secure the ceasefire in Gaza means that all of the other conflicts of the risk are escalating. That is Yemen, that is now Hezbollah-Israel, that is now obviously with the killing of Hamas leader in Tehran, which is quite a daring and provocative thing, the risk of it going really bad.
Let's hope that the wiser heads in Tehran and Washington primarily prevails in the next few days, but we don't know.
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been sentenced to 16 years on espionage charges. He is seen here in court on July 19.
Russia sentences US reporter Evan Gershkovich to 16 years
A Russian court on Friday sentenced Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to 16 years in prison on espionage charges that the US government and his newspaper maintain are fabricated. The US State Department says Gershkovich was “wrongfully detained.”
The 32-year-old journalist was arrested last year while on assignment in the Russian city of Ekaterinburg shortly after he published a story focused on Russia's economic downturn amid the war. His trial was conducted behind closed doors, and no evidence to support the Russian government’s allegations has been made public.
Fast trial leads to hope for a swap deal. The trial was conducted with considerable speed, lasting just three weeks from first hearing to sentencing. That has raised hopes that Gershkovich could soon figure into a high-profile prisoner swap deal between the Kremlin and the West. A swap deal requires a pardon from President Vladimir Putin, which can not happen until after a guilty verdict and sentencing.
Talks to that effect have reportedly been ongoing between Moscow and Washington. But the main prize Russia seems to be seeking is Vadim Krasikov, a Russian spy serving a life sentence in Germany for the murder of a Kremlin opponent in Berlin in 2019.
So far, Germany has been reluctant to release him, but with Gershkovich’s sentencing complete, US pressure to reach a deal could now rise as the Biden administration seeks a high-profile diplomatic success as part of its reelection campaign.
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich stands inside an enclosure for defendants before a court hearing to consider an appeal against his pre-trial detention on espionage charges in Moscow, Russia, October 10, 2023.
Russia to try US journalist in secret
The upcoming espionage trial of Evan Gershkovich, the American journalist arrested last year in Russia, will be conducted in secret, according to Russian media.
Gershkovich, the son of Soviet emigrés, was reporting for the Wall Street Journal when he was detained on charges of collecting sensitive information about the Russian military. Russian prosecutors allege he was working on behalf of the CIA, but have presented no evidence publicly to support this claim. The Journal, along with the US government, says the charges are bogus.
Gershkovich’s detention has prompted talk of a possible prisoner swap with the West. The US has reportedly made several offers, but none has satisfied the Kremlin, which is seeking the release of one man in particular: Vadim Krasikov, a Russian spy serving a life sentence in Germany for the brazen, 2019 murder of a Kremlin opponent in Berlin.
The Germans, wary of setting a precedent that encourages Russia to use detained Westerners as bargaining chips, have so far shown little interest in releasing Krasikov. Whether the US might apply more pressure on Berlin remains to be seen. For now, there is no indication of how long Gershkovich’s black-box trial might last.
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich stands behind a glass wall of an enclosure for defendants before a court hearing
Hard Numbers: Gershkovich to remain in Russian prison, Myanmar refugee camp airstrike, Micheal Jordan pumpkin breaks records, fall of the Argentine peso
9: Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter detained by Russian authorities earlier this year, lost his appeal on Tuesday and will remain in a Russian prison until at least Nov. 30. At that point, he will have spent 9 months behind bars for allegations of espionage. Espionage trials in Russia can be lengthy, and the country’s Foreign Ministry says it will not consider a prisoner swap until after a verdict is reached.
29: In Myanmar, an artillery strike on a refugee camp near the Chinese border killed 29 people. Myanmar has been embroiled in a civil war since a military coup in 2021, but several ethnic insurgents, including the Kachin Independence Organization – which controlled the area where the strike occurred – have been fighting for self-rule for decades.
2,749: A new record has been set for the world's largest pumpkin. Named Michael Jordan because it resembled a basketball early on, the large orange squash weighed in at a whopping 2,749 pounds. It was planted in April by a horticultural teacher in Minnesota, who put $15,000 into the pumpkin’s care to win himself $30,000 in prize money.
17: Javier Milei, the frontrunner in Argentina’s election race who seeks to dollarize Argentina’s economy, continued his attacks on the peso this week, discouraging Argentinians from holding any investments in the currency. As a result, the peso has fallen 17% since Monday, further driving up prices amid the country’s worst financial crisis in two decades.
Visitors attend a night market in Shanghai, China
Hard Numbers: China’s post-zero bump, diamonds for Hezbollah, Gershkovich bail bust, seafloor surprise
4.5: China’s economy grew at a 4.5% annual clip in the first quarter this year as the world’s second-largest economy dropped its “zero-Covid” restrictions and roared back to life. This beat analyst expectations but still fell short of President Xi Jinping’s 5% growth target for 2023. That rustling sound you hear is millions of Chinese bureaucrats and businesses scrambling to figure out how to close that half-point gap before December.
440 million: US prosecutors on Tuesday charged prominent Beirut-based art collector Nazem Ahmad -- who remains at large -- with exporting $440 million worth of art and diamonds in violation of US sanctions. Ahmad was sanctioned in 2019 for allegedly financing Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese political party and militia that Washington considers a terrorist group. The UK followed up on Tuesday by also sanctioning Ahmad and freezing his assets.
50 million: A Moscow court on Tuesday ruled that Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter arrested in Russia on espionage charges last month, must remain in prison ahead of his upcoming trial. The newspaper’s parent company, Dow Jones, had offered to pay a bail of 50 million rubles (about $610,000) to release Gershkovich to house arrest in Moscow. In a real shocker, the court sided with prosecutors and said “nyet.”
1,970: Good news from 1,970 feet below the sea! Scientists descended to an unexplored section of Ecuador’s Galápagos marine reserve and found a coral reef “teeming with life.” The discovery gives hope that even as climate change alters the level and chemical composition of the sea, there are still bounties of underwater nature to enjoy and protect.
Undated photo posted by Jack Teixeira\'s mother on Veterans Day Nov 11, 2021 on her Facebook page.
What We're Watching: Pentagon leaker suspect arrested, Gershkovich swap chatter, Uruguay’s free trade ambitions
And the suspected leaker is ...
On Thursday afternoon, the FBI arrested a suspect in the most damaging US intel leak in a decade, identifying him as Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Teixeira was reportedly the leader of an online gaming chat group, where he had been allegedly sharing classified files for three years. If convicted of violating the US Espionage Act, he could spend the rest of his life behind bars. Teixeira will appear in a Boston court on Friday.
We know that the chat group was made up of mostly male twentysomethings that loved guns, racist online memes, and, of course, video games. We don’t know what motivated the leaks, what other classified material the leaker had, or whether any of the docs were divulged to a foreign intelligence agency.
Arresting a suspect, though, is just the beginning of damage control for the Pentagon and the Biden administration. Although the content of the leaks surprised few within the broader intel community, many might not have realized the extent to which the US spies on its allies.
Uncle Sam obviously would’ve preferred to have intercepted the message this scandal sends to America’s enemies: US intel is not 100% secure.
Russia is maybe considering swap for Evan Gershkovich
A top Russian diplomat suggested Thursday that Moscow could explore a prisoner swap with the US in order to release American journalist Evan Gershkovich, whom Russian authorities jailed earlier this month on espionage charges.
But first, said Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, the trial against Gershkovich will have to play out in full. That could take as long as a year.
What might Russia want in exchange? Hard to say. Last year, the Kremlin swapped WNBA star Brittney Griner, convicted of a drug offense while traveling in Russia, for notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout. At the time, the Kremlin also reportedly sought the release of a Russian assassin from a German prison, but that swap broke down when the Kremlin refused to also release Paul Whelan, an American currently serving an espionage sentence in Russia.
A year from now, the world, and the Ukraine war, might look very different. But expect the Kremlin to throw the book at Gershkovich to maximize their leverage ahead of any talks about his release.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Russia’s prison system, opposition leader Alexei Navalny — currently in solitary confinement — has suffered a fresh health crisis that his spokeswoman says is another attempt to poison him.
For context, see our recent interview with Daniel Roher, director of the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny.
Uruguay’s FTA dream
Uruguay's Foreign Minister Francisco Bustillo will soon meet with Chinese officials to take steps toward establishing a Free Trade Agreement between the two countries. Uruguay has wanted an FTA for three decades, and the timing might finally be right as China seeks to increase its influence in South America.
Getting an FTA with China has been a priority for Uruguay’s President Luis Lacalle Pou's administration. The meeting will come on the heels of trade talks between Brazil and China, countries that saw their two-way trade hit a record $171.5 billion in 2022. Uruguay wants in on the action.
China has deepened its trade relationships in Latin America throughout the 21st century, beating out the US as the region's largest trading partner. Beijing benefits politically from these partnerships, gaining votes at the UN and support for Chinese appointees to multinational institutions, as well as the ability to implement technology standards into regional infrastructure.
But not all of Uruguay's neighbors are comfortable with China's swelling influence in the region, or with Uruguay flying solo. Uruguay is facing resistance from other Mercosur countries that favor negotiating regional trade deals as a bloc. Paraguay, which still recognizes Taipei in lieu of the government in Beijing, is leading the pushback – a conflict that could test one of the bloc’s few rules: a restriction on making preferential agreements with third countries.
Russia and the global order
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Lots of Russia news, as is so often the case over the last year. A little bit less frankly about Ukraine and more about Russia's position vis-a-vis the US and the global order, and I fear/suspect that that is increasingly going to be what we're going to be talking about going forward. One big piece of news, of course, this American journalist for the Wall Street Journal arrested on charges of espionage, Evan Gershkovich, it's going to be a secret trial. The Russians, having picked him up, said that they caught him red-handed. There is no presumption of innocence when you're grabbed on espionage in Russia.
The Americans will probably never find out what they're even specifically charging him with. And this is 20 years, up to 20 year sentencing, almost certain over the coming couple of months that he will be found guilty and then probably sent to a high security facility, could be tortured. I mean, this is the sort of thing that we've been seeing from Alexei Navalny over the past year, and is a clear step up in a direct action against American citizens by Russia. We haven't seen anything like this, frankly, since the '80s. So I mean since the heyday of the Cold War, '86 I think was when Daniloff was arrested. So in other words, before Perestroika, before Glasnost. This were the real old days of, as Ronald Reagan called them, Evil Empire. Well, that's clearly where US-Russia relations are right now. And unlike previous arrests, this meant to cause massive headlines and meant to be arbitrary, meant to chill the idea that Western journalists can conduct their business in Russia. They should obviously all leave. And also meant to show the Americans that the Russians are willing to take more direct, albeit incremental, steps beyond outside the Ukraine War directly.
If you go to Russia, if you listen or watch their state media, you'll see that they have been saying that they're fighting a war, not against Ukraine, but against NATO. And that's because NATO is providing the training, they're providing the equipment, they're providing the material, they're providing the intelligence. They're not involved in the fight directly, but they're certainly indirectly engaged in a proxy war after the Russians illegally invaded Ukraine. The Russian response to this is increasingly being willing to lash out against Westerners. And I think this is an important and significant escalatory move, even if it's one that has been calculated by the Russians not to lead to a precipitous American reaction, not the kind of thing that we want to see.
And then on top of that, this weekend, another terrorist attack, this in St. Petersburg, and where a cafe that had been owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is the CEO, Owner of the Wagner Group, this paramilitary organization that has been doing a lot of fighting at Putin's behest, of course in Ukraine. And in early fighting, reasonably successfully, more recently not so much, in part because they've not been able to get ammunition, and they've been increasingly public about that and increasingly directly critical of the Russian Defense Ministry, of Russia's regular military forces and hierarchy and leadership, not of course directly in any way critical of Putin himself. But that fight has been growing, and so the fact that Vladlen Tatarsky, who is a very well-known military blogger, is incredibly hawkish, is hugely supportive of the war in Ukraine and has been supported by Prigozhin and the Wagner Group, he was assassinated, bomb went off, apparently hidden in a statuette that was presented to him by some woman who attended the talk.
Of course, immediately we're going to hear that this was the Ukrainians behind it. The Ukrainians, of course, were found to be behind the assassination attempt of Aleksandr Dugin, who is a strong sort of ultra nationalist, calling essentially for genocide of Ukrainians. And didn't get him, got his daughter instead, when at the last moment they switched cars. That's a terrorist attack, he's a civilian. But certainly wasn't intended to have collateral damage. Here you saw the video perhaps, I mean, it blew up the cafe and lots of other people were injured. It could have been the Ukrainians. I'm not saying it's implausible, but in this case, I think it's unlikely. I think it's more likely that this is a group that is not happy with Prigozhin increasingly attacking them. So perhaps either anti-war movement in Russia, or perhaps more likely pro-war movement in Ukraine, which is the vast majority of the Russian people at this point, but anti-Prigozhin, anti-Wagner group.
And the fact that there is this internal fight in Ukraine, ultimately that that's not likely to go well. And they haven't been able to take the town of Bakhmut after months of fighting, after lots of crowing by Prigozhin that this was imminent, and even Zelensky was able to visit in the past couple of weeks. Clearly an enormous embarrassment for Prigozhin, and this implies that he's under a lot of pressure. And frankly, I mean, there have been some rumors that he could be the next president of Russia challenging Putin. I think it's much more likely that he isn't with us for very much longer, that someone takes him out. But in either case, what we're seeing is more instability in Russia, more pressure on Russia.
The Russian economy performed extremely well compared to the sanctions that were leveled against it in the first year of the war. Indeed, the Americans have been surprised with how resilient the economy was. In the early days of the war, the US focused much more on economic sanctions and less on the provision of direct military support to the Ukrainians. Turned out the latter was much more important than the former in making a difference in the battlefield. And that was probably an early mistake by the Biden administration. But now that we're in the second year, we are seeing that Russian gas is getting stranded, Russia's having a harder time exporting oil, also at a significant discount, and the pressure on the Russian economy is growing. They've also lost an enormous amount of human capital, and of course the cost of the war itself. And they have to rebuild their own military industrial complex, which means they lose a lot of the contracts for export, which were a big source of hard currency for the Russians.
And we saw Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch, recently saying publicly that he sees the Russian economy under a lot more pressure. He wasn't saying that three months ago, six months ago. So all of those things imply that while the war in Ukraine is becoming somewhat more stable, not as many frontline attacks, frankly not as many civilians getting killed, and not as much movement territorially either in favor of the Ukrainians or the Russians. That may change with an imminent Ukrainian counter offensive, though even then, probably not all that much. But the position of Russia vis-a-vis NATO, we continue to see nothing but escalation, as we are in the 14th month of this war. And that, of course, longer term is much more dangerous geopolitically.
So that's a little bit for me. That's where I see right now. I hope everyone's going well, and I'll talk to you all real soon.