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M. GESSEN
Navalny Couldn’t Be Freed Until Gershkovich Was Kidnapped. Gershkovich Couldn’t Be Freed Until Navalny Was Dead.
Opinion Columnist
A few days ago, Russian political prisoners started vanishing from their prison colonies: Their lawyers would come to see them only to be told their clients were no longer there. The disappearance of an inmate is often bad news — it can mean a move to a more remote colony, illness or death. But as the number of “missing” prisoners grew, in the Russian dissident community a mounting sense of anticipation replaced the concern. “A trade,” a prominent Russian in exile posted on his Facebook page, without bothering to explain the reference. “Definitely a trade,” posted a young Russian activist in exile, a day later. “I am hopeful and I’m afraid to say the word,” posted another.
On Thursday, Russia released the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, along with 15 other inmates. In exchange, Germany, the United States, Slovenia, Norway and Poland together released a total of eight prisoners, including the Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov. It was the largest and most complicated prisoner swap in this country’s history. It was also the largest such bargain the West has ever struck with Russia, a country whose legal system is designed to punish opponents of the regime and to generate hostages.
The story of this exchange began a year before Gershkovich’s arrest, in late January 2022. Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist living in Vienna, was strolling along Silver Lake Reservoir in Los Angeles with Maria Pevchikh, a leading figure in the anti-corruption movement started by the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny.
Grozev, tall and lanky, moves with an awkwardness that suggests a boy who grew too fast. He sometimes forgets his backpack in cafes and he is peculiarly open for someone in his line of work. Pevchikh, who is a good two heads shorter, is organized, relentlessly logical, suspicious of strangers and careful with her words. The two had first connected after Grozev reached out to Navalny on Twitter. Navalny had survived a poisoning attempt that very nearly took his life. Grozev thought he might have identified the people who had done it.
Along with the producer Odessa Rae and the director Daniel Roher, Grozev had recently left Ukraine after offending too many powerful people. Together, the three wanted to come to Germany, where Navalny was recuperating, to make a movie about him and his failed assassins.
The resulting collaboration, called simply “Navalny,” contained the single greatest scene in the history of documentary filmmaking, an eight-minute sequence in which Navalny, pretending to be an assistant to the head of the Russian secret police, dials one of his failed assassins and gets an unwitting confession out of him. Grozev and Pevchikh are sitting to either side of Navalnny, stifling screams of horror mixed with delight.
Weeks after that phone call, Navalny flew back to Moscow and was immediately arrested. A year after that, “Navalny” was winning major awards and heading for an Oscar, and Grozev and Pevchikh were discussing how to leverage that success to secure Navalny’s release.
On that stroll around the reservoir, they came up with a crazy scheme they decided to call Secret Project Silver Lake. They wanted to organize a swap of Russian spies held in Western prisons for Navalny and other Russian political prisoners. When Pevchikh got back to where the team was staying, she Googled “Glienicke Bridge,” a crossing between what used to be East and West Berlin, the site of several prior prisoner swaps, including one that involved four countries and almost 30 people.
It was around this time that Grozev learned that Russia had sent a squad, or squads, of assassins to kill him. Austrian and American authorities warned him not to return to Vienna, where his wife and two children were. I met Grozev around the same time, and played a minor role in helping him get situated. Soon we started meeting every couple of weeks, for what I thought would eventually be a profile of him.
James P. Rubin, who was leading a State Department project on Russian disinformation (and who had recently watched “Navalny”), heard about Grozev’s situation, and offered a room in his own house.
Grozev moved in and spent the next couple of months explaining Secret Project Silver Lake, which Rubin would eventually take to his boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
On Feb. 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Pevchikh and her colleagues were alarmed for Navalny: The F.S.B. had already tried to kill him at least once. Whatever was preventing the Kremlin from having him killed in prison — some remnant of concern for Russia’s standing in the world, some semblance of regard for legitimacy — would be gone now.
“If they were bombing Kyiv,” she told me, recounting her thoughts at the time, “if they were killing tens of thousands of civilians, then murdering Aleksei had gone from being a very big thing to being a very small thing.” Secret Project Silver Lake was more urgent than ever.
In the summer of 2022, Pevchikh landed a meeting with Hillary Clinton. Grozev and Pevchikh were impressed — Clinton was, they thought, the first person who really got it. She warned that a plan like this would take years to pull off, but she took the idea to the White House. President Biden, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Blinken eventually came on board.
They weren’t primarily in it for Navalny, however. They were in it for a former Marine named Paul Whelan, who had gone to Moscow in search of adventure and business opportunities and ended up arrested and sentenced to 16 years for what the Russians called espionage.
In April 2022, Russia had swapped another former Marine, Trevor Reed (sentenced to nine years for supposedly attacking Moscow police officers), for a Russian pilot the United States had convicted of drug smuggling. In December 2022, Russia traded the W.N.B.A. player Brittney Griner (sentenced to nine years for bringing a vaping pen with marijuana into the country) for the arms dealer Viktor Bout. Whelan, who had been in custody longer than either Reed or Griner, fell by the wayside both times.
To give up someone accused of espionage, the Russians would need a bigger reward. Someone like Krasikov, a Russian who was serving a life sentence in Germany for carrying out a political assassination in the middle of the day in a Berlin park.
Americans had previously gauged German interest in releasing Krasikov in exchange for Whelan. Germany had said no — a rare and painful rejection for the White House, and one that made it all that more unlikely that Secret Project Silver Lake could succeed.
But in March 2023, the terrain shifted again.
Russian authorities arrested Evan Gershkovich, a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, and charged him with espionage.
The last time Russia had arrested an American journalist was in 1986, when it accused the U.S. News & World Report correspondent Nicholas Daniloff of espionage. It was an obvious response to the U.S. arrest of a Russian employee of the United Nations a few days earlier, and it took only a few more weeks for the two of them to be exchanged, with two Soviet dissidents thrown in.
For Secret Project Silver Lake, Gershkovich’s arrest presented an opportunity of sorts — for the White House to approach Germany again. Grozev kept telling any official who would listen that Germany would be more receptive if Navalny, a hero in that country, were also part of the package. Grozev had another card to play: His own investigative work had played a crucial role in identifying Krasikov as the man who conducted that assassination in the Berlin park. Grozev’s own testimony had helped put him behind bars. If Grozev signaled that he was in favor of the swap — despite the possibility that Krasikov, once released, might retaliate — the Germans might be more willing to consider it.
Rubin summed up the German dilemma as “moral imperative versus moral hazard.” The moral imperative was to save hostages. The moral hazard was the danger of establishing precedent by releasing an assassin, one who had acted brazenly on German soil. Even inside the German cabinet, there was no agreement.
And then there was the question of how to conduct the negotiations. Standard diplomatic channels are too inflexible for such a complicated deal. The Russian government is a black box. Everyone knows that President Vladimir Putin personally makes all important decisions, but no one knows who has enough access to him to pose the questions. So Grozev tried to find his own ways in, through Russian intelligence contacts he had developed while attempting to find his would-be assassins.
In the summer of 2023, Grozev reached out to a spy — someone who he says was trained from childhood for a career in espionage. Grozev suspected the man of being one of his potential assassins, but also of being able to help negotiate a swap.
Pevchikh wouldn’t hear of Grozev meeting with the spy directly. So they dispatched Odessa Rae, the producer of “Navalny,” an American former actress who has never met an adventure that scares her.
I was having lunch with Grozev once when Rae was off in a European country meeting with the spy. Grozev was fretting, because he hadn’t heard from her in hours. Then she called. She’d been dining with the spy. He was charming, she said, and didn’t seem like an assassin at all. “She has been Stockholm-ed,” Grozev said, referring to the fictional syndrome that supposedly makes hostages love their captors. The spy promised to take the proposed prisoner-exchange proposal to Putin. It’s not clear if he did.
At the same time, Gershkovich’s mother, Ella Milman, was mounting a campaign of her own. As her son’s colleagues at The Wall Street Journal have written, she was shuttling all over the world, finding ways to meet with top U.S. and German officials, with the goal of convincing them to broker her son’s release.
By February 2024, the White House was finally, fully behind the idea of negotiating a deal. A pre-existing channel — already used to execute the Reed and Griner transfers — “on the intelligence side of the house,” in Washington-speak, was activated. It appeared that the Kremlin agreed to a trade that would involve Gershkovich, Navalny, and several other Russian dissidents. Grozev and Pevchikh, in Munich for the annual security conference, were ecstatic. On the evening of Feb. 15, they debated whether to buy champagne or hold off until the trade had happened. Out of superstition, they decided to hold off.
Late that night, Pevchikh suddenly blurted out a terrifying question: “But what if they kill him?”
That’s silly, Grozev told her. There is a protocol, a way these things are done.
Pevchikh later told me that she had no idea why she even asked what she asked: It wasn’t a fear she was aware of experiencing. The next day, the world learned that Navalny had died in a Russian prison.
Millions of Russians lost their hope for the future. Grozev and Pevchikh lost their friend.
A week earlier, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin had made his first reference to a possible swap, suggesting that Gershkovich could be traded for “a person who, out of patriotic sentiments, liquidated a bandit in one of the European capitals” — meaning Krasikov. Now, Grozev and Pevchikh wondered: By making Navalny’s release a condition of the swap, had they hastened his death? And did this mean that naming any other Russian dissident would hasten their death, too? But Navalny was in a class by himself. No one else scared Putin as much. And anyway, by now the process was out of Grozev’s and Pevchikh’s hands. The government negotiators had taken over.
In October 2023, Russia took hostage another American journalist, Alsu Kurmasheva, who worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague. Kurmasheva, who is also a Russian national, had been visiting her ailing mother. The journalist was sentenced to six-and-a-half years for spreading false information about the Russian armed forces.
Russia was also taking German hostages, including Kevin Lik, an 18-year-old high-school student who also holds Russian citizenship and was sentenced to four years in prison for high treason. Late last year, Belarus, Russia’s closest ally, arrested Rico Krieger, a former employee of the German Red Cross, and sentenced him to death for what the government called terrorism. In the face of a death sentence, the moral-hazard argument could no longer hold up.
***
On Thursday, a Russian plane carrying 16 people, among them Americans, Germans and Russians, landed in Ankara, Turkey. In exchange, Russia got Krasikov, along with a Russian hacker and a Russian businessman convicted of insider trading, both of whom had been serving time in the United States, and five convicted or suspected spies, released by the United States, Norway, Poland and Slovenia. Grozev’s investigative work had played a key role identifying several of the spies.
The three Americans posed for a photo with an American flag. They looked as one would expect: happy and emaciated. A neat stack of sandwiches was waiting on what appeared to be a conference table behind them. Then they and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a journalist and political activist who had survived two assassination attempts before being sentenced to 25 years for high treason, flew to the United States.
The freed dissidents are: Ilya Yashin, an opposition politician sentenced to eight and a half years for “spreading false information about the Russian armed forces”; Oleg Orlov, a 71-year-old human-rights activist sentenced to two and a half years for “discrediting the Russian armed forces”; Alexandra Skochilenko, an artist sentenced to seven years for “spreading false information”; Andrei Pivovarov, an activist sentenced to four years for being a member of what Russia calls an “undesirable organization”; and three former heads of regional chapters of Navalny’s organization, all of them sentenced for “extremist activities” — Ksenia Fadeyeva and Vadim Ostanin, who were serving nine years each, and Lilia Chanysheva, who had been sentenced to nine and a half years.
These charges, like the espionage charges against Gershkovich, are often described as “trumped up.” This is wrong: it implies that the former inmates didn’t commit the acts of which they were accused.
In fact, they did. They organized politically. They practiced journalism. They called the war in Ukraine a war, rather than a “special military operation.” Skochilenko, the artist, replaced price tags in a St. Petersburg store with miniature notes containing information on the number of civilian casualties in Mariupol, a Ukrainian city then under siege by Russian forces. All of this is illegal under Russian law. Espionage or high treason, for example, is defined as the gathering of any information — classified or not — for distribution to any foreigners, regardless of whether they work for a government. Any foreign correspondent working in Russia is, by Russia’s definition, engaged in espionage. Any journalist covering the war in Ukraine could be charged with “spreading false information about the Russian armed forces.”
I am one of those journalists. I was recently convicted of this crime in absentia, and sentenced to eight years in prison.
The people released on Thursday were arrested using laws specifically created to make it possible to arrest almost anyone — to build a legalistic framework for hostage taking.
Many states have policies, or at least claim publicly to have policies, of not engaging with these kinds of systems for fear of encouraging further hostage-taking. “A lot of red lines have been crossed,” Grozev acknowledged, when I talked with him on the morning of the swap. The Germans, in particular, violated longstanding policies. The British government did not take part in the exchange, even though one of the hostages has a British passport. But as far as the Kremlin is concerned, Washington’s position represents all of the West. Does this mean that all Western countries — their citizens and the hundreds of thousands of Russians living in exile — are now at greater risk?
I asked Joel Simon, director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, where I also teach, how to think about this. Simon spent 16 years at the helm of the Committee to Protect Journalists and wrote a book called “We Want to Negotiate.” “Refusing to negotiate or ‘make concessions’ will not cause hostage taking to disappear and will only lead to the suffering of those held hostage,” he messaged me. “A good deal is the best outcome one can hope for in a really bad situation.”
Grozev is less sanguine. In the long run, he is convinced, the risk to Russian dissidents, those the Kremlin perceives as enemies of the state, and random Westerners who may be within reach of Russia or Belarus is greater now than before the swap. “The ability to instrumentalize each arrest in Russia or Belarus” raises the risk of the next round of arrests, he said. The apparent rescue of a Russian assassin and several spies, he explained, delivers on Moscow’s promise to its agents that they can always come home — and that raises the risk of future assassinations.
For Grozev himself, the risk is more specific. The man he had helped put behind bars had been welcomed back to Moscow by Putin himself, with a warm embrace at the bottom of aircraft steps. “I don’t know how I feel about Krasikov being free,” Grozev said. “He stared at me in court.” The moral hazard of this swap may translate into mortal danger for the people who made it possible.
One of the people who made it possible was Aleksei Navalny. If he had not been arrested, Grozev and Pevchikh wouldn’t have concocted Secret Project Silver Lake. If he had not died, the swap would most likely have never happened. Putin would probably never have let him go free. “This should have been such a happy day,” Pevchikh said to me. “But — ” She paused. “This ‘but’ is as big as Earth itself.”
Compounding Pevchikh’s sense of loss is the fact that three of Navalny’s lawyers and one of his fellow activists who stood trial alongside him — “the only people who had access to Navalny for the last three years of his life,” she said — remain in prison, as do hundreds of others sentenced for journalism, activism and truth-telling. Now that Russia has extracted its agents, the West has less to offer it in exchange for these hostages. Nor is it likely to try, if my conversations with Washington officials involved in this swap are any indication. For them the Russian dissidents were something of an afterthought, an addition forced by Grozev and Pevchikh — and, eventually, by Navalny’s death.
And yet, 16 people have joined the rest of us on this side of the Russian border. Unlike Russia’s spies and assassins, they will never be able to go home again. But at least they can live and speak freely despite the targets on their backs.
M. Gessen is an Opinion columnist for The Times. They won a George Polk award for opinion writing in 2024. They are the author of 11 books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017. Last month they were sentenced in absentia by a Russian court to eight years in prison for “spreading false information.”
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