President Joe Biden finalized the deal to get Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan released from Russian captivity about an hour before he announced he was ending his re-election campaign.
The eventual prisoner swap that saw Gershkovich and Whelan returned to the U.S. took place five months after the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison camp, despite talks to get him released involving the U.S. and Germany, and the two allies continued working on a deal for other prisoners up until Biden's surprise announcement, reported the Wall Street Journal.
"President Biden — about an hour before he notified the world he was dropping out of the presidential race on July 21 — called the prime minister of Slovenia, whose country was contributing two convicted Russian spies to the swap, to secure the pardon necessary for the deal to proceed," the newspaper reported. "CIA Director William Burns traveled to Turkey last week to meet his counterpart there and finalize the logistics for the swap."
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Details of the deal remain closely held, but American officials familiar with the talks said Russia insisted on the return of convicted murderer Vadim Krasikov, who was sentenced to life in prison by a German court in 2021 for killing a Georgian asylum seeks who had fought against Russia in Chechnya.
The deal also returned two Russians held in Slovenia, one in Poland, and another in Norway, all of whom U.S. officials say have ties to Kremlin intelligence.
Gershkovich and Whelan had both been convicted of espionage, a charge both of them denied, and the U.S. State Department had classified them as wrongfully detained.
A breakthrough in negotiations came in February, when German chancellor Olaf Scholz met with the president in the Oval Office and they discussed a potential offer to Russia that would have included Krasikov, Whelan, Gershkovich, and Navalny.
"For you, I will do this," Scholz told Biden, according to a senior administration official.
However, Navalny died seven days later under mysterious circumstances, and the offer collapsed before it was presented to Moscow, but vice president Kamala Harris met privately with Scholz at a conference in Munich to stress the importance of releasing Krasikov, and she met with Robert Golob, the prime minister of Slovenia, to continue the negotiations.
The negotiations reportedly continued into summer before Biden finalized the deal, and he then released a statement announcing that he would not seek re-election and then endorsed his vice president for the Democratic nomination.
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