American and Western Hostages and Russian Dissidents Were Freed in a Multi-State Prisoner Exchange for Admitted Russian Criminal Agents

A multi-State prisoner exchange last week involving 24 people, including Americans and citizens of 6 foreign States, freed multiple American and Western hostages in exchange for Russian criminals. The exchange involved the United States, Germany, Slovenia, Poland and Norway on the one side and Russia and Belarus on the other. It was the largest prisoner exchange since the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Two American citizens, including a reporter for a conservative newspaper and a former U.S. Marine, who had been falsely accused of espionage and one Russian-American journalist for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the U.S. international news services were released, as were several Russian political prisoners. Two of the dissidents I had posted about, namely opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Russian-Briton who is a U.S. resident who had twice been poisoned by Russia, and Oleg Orlov, the founder of a Nobel Prize-winning human rights organization were freed, as were several associates of the late opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison earlier this year where he had been maltreated before the exchange could be made. Several of the dissidents and the Russian-American journalist had been persecuted for opposing the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Exchanged for the hostages and dissidents were Russian cyber attackers, spies, and a murderer convicted in Germany in 2021 for killing a Chechen-Russian exile on the orders of the Russian government. After having denied it, Russia admitted the criminals were its intelligence agents. The deal mediated by Turkey a member of the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Such prisoner exchanges with despotic regimes are common, in which a dictatorship takes foreigners hostage and falsely accuses them of crimes and exchanges them for its agents who were duly convicted of crimes in free States, but not usually on such a scale or ever with this many States involved. These exchanges, which sometimes are not of equal numbers, often encourage dictators to kidnap more hostages to protect their spies and criminal agents. But this exchange was different, not only because Russia had to admit its agents commit cyberattacks and attack and kill people on foreign soil, but because several prominent Russian dissidents had to be released along with the foreign hostages, which spared them from the same fate as Navalny. Although they are no longer in Russia, they can continue to raise international awareness about Russian tyranny and corruption from abroad and try to unite the fragmented Russian opposition to ex-Soviet intelligence officer, Vladimir Putin, the tyrant who was elected to office and then took away Russians liberty and who does not permit free and fair elections, or they could even secretly return to Russia to continue their work for freedom for Russia at the risk of imprisonment and death, like Navalny did.