Why Putin gave up his hostages

In releasing Evan Gershkovich and others before November, the Russian president has denied Trump a diplomatic victory.

Photo by Alexander Nemenov / AFP via Getty Images

To call what happened in Ankara today (1 August) a “prisoner swap” is to test the limits of that phrase. To be sure, many of the 16 people released by Russia could be seen as political prisoners – such as Vladimir Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin, and Oleg Orlov – locked up for their opposition to Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine. But the more accurate way to describe every single one of them would be as hostages of Putin’s regime.

On a human level, the fact that they have now been freed is extraordinarily good news. Evan Gershkovich has spent more than a year in terrible conditions inside a Russian prison cell just for being an American journalist. Paul Whelan, a former US marine who was arrested in Moscow where he was attending a wedding in 2018, has endured almost six years in a Russian penal colony after a sham trial. Alsu Kurmasheva, an American-Russian journalist detained in October 2023, has been unable to speak to her two children for nine months. For much of that time, she has been confined to a cold, cramped cell, sleeping next to a hole in the floor that served as the toilet.

Surrounded by the visibly relieved families of the American detainees as he announced the news of their release at the White House, Joe Biden said he had already spoken to them and wished them “happy almost home”. He led the assembled press corps in singing “Happy Birthday” to Kurmasheva’s daughter, who was about to turn 13 and will now be able to celebrate with her mum.

The grainy images of the handover on the tarmac at an airport in the Turkish capital evoked the tense exchanges of the Cold War, when Soviet and Western spies were traded in neutral territory. But this is not what happened here. On the Russian side, the individuals who were freed were journalists, lawyers, human rights campaigners, anti-war protesters, and opposition politicians. The eight prisoners released by Western countries as part of the seven-nation deal included Vadim Krasikov, an FSB assassin who was convicted of shooting dead a Chechen dissident in broad daylight in a Berlin park in 2019; Russian intelligence agents who were arrested in Slovenia, Poland and Norway; and a selection of Russian cyber-criminals and smugglers who were serving prison sentences in the US.

In other words, Putin secured the release of an assortment of Russian spies and criminals – most importantly, Krasikov, who was at the centre of the deal – in exchange for freeing a group of innocent people who should never have been imprisoned in the first place. This is not a new approach. He takes hostages because he understands their value. He has learned through years of experience that these thuggish tactics work. It is not a coincidence that Gershkovich was arrested in Russia in March 2023, less than four months after the US basketball star Brittney Griner was released. In that exchange, Putin got back the notorious Russian arms dealer, Victor Boot. He already had Whelan, who had been detained since 2018, but he needed more Americans – Kurmasheva was also detained in October 2023 – to trade for his wish list of assassins and saboteurs when the time was right.

There will be no shortage of speculation about why Putin decided that time was now, and whether it was intended as a gift of sorts – even a peace offering – to the outgoing Biden administration and Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Donald Trump had been bragging for months that only he could secure Gershkovich’s release, thanks to his personal relationship with Putin, which he promised would follow his election victory in November. The former and would-be future president declared on social media in May, “Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, will do that for me, but not for anyone else, and WE WILL BE PAYING NOTHING!” If those words reached the Russian leader, he appears to have raised his middle finger in response.

Perhaps Putin wanted to teach Trump a lesson about demonstrating more respect, or perhaps the part about “paying nothing” convinced him that it was better to make the trade now while a palatable deal was on the table. But we should avoid dignifying Putin’s brazen hostage-taking by dressing this up as anything more than it is. He ordered, or at a minimum approved, the arrest of a series of innocent people to be used as human bargaining chips, no matter the devastating individual cost. He has now cashed them in to get what he always wanted – his own people back. This was a complex deal, involving secret negotiations over many months among multiple countries. When the pieces were in place and Krasikov’s release had been secured, Putin handed over his hostages. This is not more complicated than that.

Putin is a bipartisan opportunist. He does not, contrary to some beliefs, hold any special affection for one American president over the next. As he has repeatedly articulated it, Russia is locked in a long-term, existential struggle with the West in general, and the US in particular. The perceived strengths and weakness of individual leaders might affect his tactical decisions, but they do not alter his overall strategic calculus. If Trump has allowed his vanity to persuade him otherwise – that they share some sort of mutual strongman affinity – then he is wrong.

There is another political calculation for Putin here too. As part of this exchange, he has freed the most prominent surviving opposition leaders who had been detained in recent years. This is not an act of clemency. The Kremlin does not want to risk creating new martyrs like Alexei Navalny, whose death in a Russian prison in the Arctic in February provoked a spontaneous outpouring of public mourning as tens of thousands of Russians defied official warnings to pay their respects at his grave.

It is far preferable for the Russian leader to rid himself of any potential political challengers by sending them into exile outside the country, where he hopes they will fade into irrelevance – even better if he can show them being handed over to Western officials as part of a televised prisoner swap. Instead of the truth – that these brave Russian citizens were prepared to risk their own lives to demand a new future for their country – Putin will now insist that this is evidence that they were traitors, not patriots, all along.

By contrast, Russian state television showed Putin welcoming Krasikov and his compatriots home as heroes on a red carpet at the airport in Moscow. He greeted the FSB hitman with a hug and presented bouquets of flowers to the women in the group. They would all be given state awards, the Russian president promised, in recognition of “your loyalty… to your Motherland”.