A total of 26 prisoners — 24 adults and two minors — have been exchanged in the Turkish capital, Ankara.

The exchange included the American detainees Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan,who had been jailed on charges of espionage, as well as the German national Rico Krieger, who had previously been sentenced to death in Belarus. The Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko pardoned Krieger earlier this week.

Several Kremlin critics and Russian opposition politicians, including Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, have also been released. Yashin was being held in a penal colony in the Smolensk region. He was sentenced to 8 1/2 years in prison in 2022 for "spreading false information" about the Russian army.

A total of eight Russian citizens have been returned to Russia. They include the alleged Russian intelligence agent Vadim Krasikov. He was serving a life sentence in Germany for the murder of a Georgian national seeking asylum in Germany in Berlin's Tiergarten park in 2019.

According to news agencies' reports, seven planes were involved in the exchange operation. The Turkish secret service said that prisoners from jails in Poland, Slovenia, Norway, and Belarus had also been involved in the swap.

The operation concluded Thursday evening. Turkish officials described it as the "biggest prisoner swap between East and West since World War II."

Reactions from Washington and Moscow

Once the prisoner swap had been completed, Russian President Vladimir Putin thanked everyone involved. He expressed his particular gratitude to Belarusian President Lukashenko for pardoning Krieger.

Putin reportedly signed 12 pardons, including those for Gershkovich and Whelan, on the understanding that Russian prisoners would be repatriated from jails abroad in exchange.

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chair of the Security Council of Russia and a former president, told news agencies that he would like "traitors of Russia to rot in dungeons or die in prison" but that it was "more useful" for Russia to get back its citizens who had worked "for the fatherland."

US President Joe Biden declared that he no longer needed to speak with Putin now that the prisoner swap had been concluded. He thanked German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for concessions made by Germany, without which the swap would not have been possible, he said. Germany had agreed to hand over Krasikov, known domestically as the "Tiergarten murderer," to Russia.

Disappearances ahead of exchange?

Contact had been lost with several of the Kremlin critics held in Russian prisons, including Kara-Murza and Yashin, in the days leading up to the exchange. Neither their lawyers nor their families knew where they were. 

The fate of other imprisoned opposition figures was also unclear during this time. They included Lilia Chanysheva, the former regional coordinator of the late opposition politician Alexei Navalny's team headquarters in the city of Ufa. She had been sentenced to seven years in prison in 2021, which was extended in April to 9 1/2 years.

A few days ago, Chanysheva's husband, Almaz Gatin, tried to deliver a package for his wife to the penal colony where she was being held. He was told that Chanysheva had been transferred to another unknown prison.

The AFP news agency reports that Chanysheva was among those released, along with Ksenia Fadeyeva, who had been sentenced to nine years' imprisonment for running Navalny's campaign headquarters in Tomsk.

The lawyers of musician Aleksandra Skochilenko had tried in vain to contact their client in the days before her release. Her health has been of particular concern, as she suffers from chronic illnesses that have worsened since her imprisonment — bipolar affective disorder, celiac disease, and heart disease. The artist was serving a seven-year prison sentence for replacing supermarket pricing labels with messages opposing Russia's war in Ukraine.

Oleg Orlov, the former co-chair of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights organization Memorial, has also been released. He had been serving two and a half years for "repeatedly discrediting" the Russian army.

The young German-Russian Kevin Lick has also been freed. Now aged 19, Lick was arrested at Sochi airport in February 2023 and sentenced to four years imprisonment in a penal colony on charges of "high treason." The investigation found that he had taken photographs of Russian army installations.

Previously, in an interview with DW, the exiled Russian lawyer Ivan Pavlov had predicted that a prisoner exchange might be in the cards. When asked about the prisoners who had "disappeared," he speculated that "they might come to Moscow, where the regime can guarantee absolute secrecy as to their whereabouts." Passports and a presidential pardon could then be prepared for them all — although he pointed out that a pardon could also be issued without a prior request, as in the case of the Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko.

Return to Soviet times

Berlin-based human rights activist Olga Romanova, founder of the civil rights organization Russia Behind Bars, also told DW a few days ago that she believed all the signs were pointing to a "big exchange" and that the German authorities were involved.

On his Telegram account, the Russian political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky wrote that Putin had recently held an unannounced meeting with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on the Russian Valaam island in Ladoga Lake. The author suspected the meeting could have been about the exchange of Krieger.

Russian political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin believes this prisoner exchange has been an attempt by Russian authorities to revive the old Soviet practice of forcing concessions abroad and discouraging domestic dissent. He added that he expected this practice to continue in the coming years.

"Putin is a representative of the system," he said. "He is reinstating a clear and familiar formula for how Soviet citizens should lead their lives."  

This article was translated from German.