A plane carrying three released Americans, including journalist Ivan Gershkovitch and former US Marine Paul Whelan, landed at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland late Thursday. prisoner exchange agreement between several countries, In which 26 prisoners were released.
Gershkovitch, Whelan and Russian-American journalist Alsou Kurmasheva were released by Russia on Thursday. It was the largest prisoner swap since the end of the Cold War.
The three American detainees were warmly welcomed by US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. They were also welcomed and hugged by their families, who had tears of joy and relief in their eyes as they saw them after a long time. “Welcome home,” Biden told the released detainees.
According to the White House, the US had negotiated the prisoner swap with Russia, Germany and three other countries. The deal, negotiated in secret for more than a year in Ankara, Turkey, involved 26 prisoners, 16 from Russia to the West and eight from the West to be sent back to Russia.
There was an emotional moment in the Oval Office for the families of the released detainees when they spoke to their loved ones on the phone.
In a brief conversation, Biden told the three Americans that they had been “wrongly” detained and that “we’re very glad” they were back home.
“We just want to say how distressed we are. You’ve been wrongly detained for a long time, and we’re glad you’re home,” Biden told the released detainees as their families stood around the president’s Resolute Desk.
“Every parent, child, spouse and loved one here with me in the Oval Office today has been praying for this day for a long time,” he said.
In an emotional conversation, Gershkovitch’s mother, a Russia-based Wall Street Journal correspondent, told her son over the phone that she was speaking.
Gershkovic’s mother said to her son over the phone, “It’s mom. Are you listening? It’s your mom.” The entire moment was captured in a two-minute video posted on Biden’s office’s X handle.
Why was he detained?
Gershkovitch was arrested in March last year on espionage charges, which she and the US government strongly denied. She was then sentenced to 16 years in a high-security Russian prison.
Whelan, a former Marine who worked as a corporate security executive in Michigan, was detained in Moscow in 2018 and convicted of espionage. He is serving a 16-year sentence in a Russian prison. Whelan and the US government have denied he is a spy and Washington has declared him “wrongfully detained.”
Kurmasheva, the editor of the US government-funded media organisation Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), went to Russia to visit her mother in May last year. However, she was briefly detained by Russian authorities while waiting for a return flight, and her dual US and Russian passports were confiscated, reports USA Today.
The 47-year-old was initially fined for failing to register her US passport with Russian authorities. However, she was arrested in October for “failure to register herself as a foreign agent.”
Subsequently, on July 19, 2024, he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for spreading false information about the Russian military.
Apart from the US and Russia, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway and Belarus were also part of the prisoner swap deal. This comes amid tense relations between the US and Russia and their lowest point since the Cold War after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
(With inputs from Reuters)