Inside the secret talks behind the biggest US-Russia prisoner swap since end of Cold War

The first photo released after Russian authorities on Thursday freed Wall Street Journalreporter Evan Gershkovich, former Marine Paul Whelan, and Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva shows the three aboard a US government jet, doing something they likely hadn’t done much of in a while: smiling.

Whelan, who served in the US Marine Corps from 2003 to 2008 and worked as a cop before taking an office job, was arrested in Moscow in 2018 on espionage charges and sentenced to 16 years behind bars. Kurmasheva, who was working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague, was arrested last fall by Russian security services and convicted less than two weeks ago for “spreading false information” about the Russian military. She was sentenced to 6.5 years behind bars. Gershkovich had been reporting critically, from Russia, on the country’s invasion of Ukraine, when he was arrested by the FSB on March 29, 2023, at a Yekaterinburg steakhouse.

They were finally freed thanks to intense negotiations over the past two years, before Gershkovich and Kurmasheva had even been arrested. It was a herculean effort negotiated by the White House, with crucial assists by the detainees’ colleagues, loved ones, tech moguls, a former secretary of state, at least one TV personality, the governments of Germany, Slovenia, Poland, Belarus, Norway, Turkey, and one particularly relentless figure: the 32-year-old Gershkovich’s mom.

On Thursday, after 490 days, Gershkovich walked out of a maximum-security Russian prison as part of the biggest and most consequential such exchange since the end of the Cold War. The Journal had been intimately engaged all along with the Biden administration to free its Moscow correspondent, along with Gershkovich’s mom,