Russian prisoner swap sparks debate over consequences: ‘Are we really feeding the beast?’

Two dozen prisoners from seven countries were freed Thursday in a historic exchange, including several U.S. citizens unjustly held in Russia.

President Joe Biden called the deal, the largest of its kind since the Cold War, a “diplomatic feat and a friendship.”

Among those released are two U.S. citizens wrongly detained by Moscow – Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan – as well as Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist, and Vladimir Kara-Muza, a legal permanent resident of the United States.

Along with the celebration and relief of the prisoners’ return home, the exchange of innocent Americans for Russian criminals has raised debate over whether it would embolden foreign adversaries to target and unjustly detain Americans for use as leverage.

“That’s a plausible criticism,” said Elizabeth Neumann, an ABC News contributor and former Homeland Security official. “Are we really feeding the beast by doing this prisoner swap, increasing the likelihood that they’re actually going to illegally arrest more people so that we have a case for releasing anyone we arrest who’s important to Putin in the future?”

Thomas Graham, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the message the prisoner swap sends to others “is something that any White House or government official would wonder about.”

“You do your best to try to limit the possibility of creating incentives to capture other Americans instead,” he said.

In a joint statement Thursday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-L., and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called the release “encouraging news” but said they “recognize that trading hardened Russian criminals for innocent Americans does little to deter Putin’s reprehensible behavior.”

“Without serious measures to deter Russia, Iran and other states hostile to the United States from further hostage-taking, the costs of hostage diplomacy will continue to rise,” they said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s modus operandi is to arrest Americans on trumped-up charges and then pick up his “henchmen” imprisoned abroad, Neumann said.

Vadim Krasikov is a key player in the historic swap for Russia, according to retired Col. Stephen Ganyard, a former U.S. deputy secretary of state. The convicted killer was serving a life sentence in Germany for a 2019 murder. In a February interview with former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, Putin indicated that Russia was willing to swap Krasikov for Gershkovich.

“The Russians held out until they could get access to this KGB assassin,” Ganyard said. “Putin will bring his KGB agents home.”

Russia can be expected to continue detaining Americans to achieve this goal, he said.

“It’s a pretty standard procedure for the Russians to detain a number of us on clearly trumped-up charges, to make sure that they still have some sort of negotiating leverage or rationale for the United States to want to talk to them,” Ganyard said.

Graham said that at present there do not appear to be many Russians in American prisons that the Kremlin wants to take back.

“I think the deal has minimal implications for anything the Russians might do in terms of capturing Americans at this point,” he said.

For Neumann, prisoner exchange negotiations are imbued with this dilemma when countries deal with hostile nations, although they are often the only way to repatriate illegally detained citizens.

“I think it’s always difficult when you’re doing these kinds of negotiations to recognize that you’re creating an incentive structure,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve heard a plausible argument that the alternative is, ‘No, we’re not going to negotiate at all, we’re just going to let these people die in a Russian prison.’”

“This is not how we take care of our citizens,” she continued.

Referring to former President Theodore Roosevelt’s quote about criticism – that “the credit goes to the man who is actually in the arena” – she said it is easy to question prisoner exchange negotiations from the sidelines.

“But until you get in the arena and fight the fight, you don’t realize how difficult these decisions are,” she said. “It’s a pretty stereotypical criticism. It’s also one in which no one has ever offered a plausible alternative to meet our obligation to care for our unlawfully detained American citizens.”

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan spoke of the requirement during a White House briefing Thursday.

“It’s hard to return a convicted criminal to secure the release of an innocent American,” he said, calling it one of the “tough decisions” involved in such exchanges. “And yet sometimes you have to choose between doing that or condemning that person to end their life in prison in a hostile foreign country or at the hands of a hostile power.”

He said the United States had assessed and analyzed that risk in this case and concluded that the benefits outweighed the risks. He also noted that Americans have been unjustly detained at times when the United States has conducted prisoner exchanges and at times when it has not.

Faced with this risk, the US government has tried to warn American citizens.

After the release of basketball star Brittney Griner in a 2022 prisoner swap, Biden “strongly” urged all Americans to take precautions when traveling abroad and to consult State Department travel advisories, including warnings about the risk of being wrongfully detained by a foreign government. a level 4 “Do not travel” warning from the State Department, the highest level possible.

“He was very clear about that warning, because what’s going to happen next is that over time we’re going to see the Russians taking in people on trumped-up charges in order to have negotiating leverage, or at least talking leverage, with the United States at some point in the future,” Ganyard said.

Asked Thursday during his prisoner exchange speech how to prevent such incitement in the future, Biden said: “I advise people not to go to certain places, tell them what’s at stake, what’s at stake.”

Graham said he did not think Russia was recruiting just anyone because it needed someone to trade with.

“These are people who have broken their laws,” he said, citing Griner, who pleaded guilty to drug charges, as an example. “Americans need to recognize, particularly if they travel to Russia, that the laws in this country are different than the laws in the United States and are much harsher in prosecuting certain offenses.”