Krasikov, Vadim

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    In Prisoner Swap, Echoes of Putin’s K.G.B. Past

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    A sprawling exchange with the West underscored the Russian president’s loyalty to his intelligence services. It also showed his continued interest in making deals.As he sat in a Russian jail for five months, the human rights champion Oleg Orlov sometimes grew wistful: What if he walked free someday as part of a deal between Russia and the West?The chances that President Vladimir V. Putin would make a prisoner swap like that seemed as remote as a “star twinkling far, far, far away on the horizon,” Mr. Orlov, 71, said this week. The dire state of the relationship between Moscow and the West, and their diverging interests, appeared to rule out the kind of detailed negotiation necessary for such a complicated deal.But last week, it happened, in the most far-reaching prisoner swap with Moscow since the Cold War: Mr. Putin and his ally Belarus freed Mr. Orlov and 15 other Russians, Germans and Americans in exchange for a convicted assassin and seven other Russians released by the West. It was a moment when Mr. Orlov saw anew how core Mr. Putin’s past with the K.G.B., the Soviet spy agency, was to the Russian president’s identity — and to the sort of country he’s trying to shape Russia into.The swap happened because “Putin is a K.G.B. man, an F.S.B. man,” Mr. Orlov said in a phone interview four days after two private jets carrying him and other released prisoners landed in Cologne, Germany. Espionage is a subject Mr. Orlov knows well, having spent decades studying the crimes of the Soviet secret police as a co-founder of the Memorial human rights group, which was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.The Russian human rights champion Oleg Orlov, shown in court in Moscow in February, was freed in the exchange last week.Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Putin served as a K.G.B. agent in Dresden, East Germany, in the 1980s and ran the F.S.B., its domestic intelligence successor agency, in the 1990s. To the Russian leader, Mr. Orlov said, showing loyalty to the F.S.B. and other Russian intelligence services by winning their agents’ freedom trumped the political risk of releasing opposition figures whom the Kremlin had branded as traitors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Long Johns, Forensics and a Bound Russian Killer: Inside the Big Prisoner Swap

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      The complex choreography caught some prisoners being freed in their robes and slippers, unaware of their fates, and required forensic experts to make positive identifications. The private jet that took off from southwest Germany on Thursday afternoon was carrying a group that may have never expected to be confined together: police officers, doctors, intelligence agents, a senior aide to Germany’s chancellor — and a convicted Russian assassin.In the back of the plane, the assassin, Vadim Krasikov, sat with his hands and feet bound and wearing a helmet that covered his face; he was not heard uttering a word on the entire flight.At the same time, a Russian government jet was also headed for Ankara, Turkey’s capital, carrying officers from the F.S.B. intelligence agency and 16 prisoners being released by Russia and Belarus. At one point, one of the F.S.B. escorts made what seemed like a bad joke to the two best-known Russian dissidents on board: “Don’t have too much fun out there, because Krasikov could come back for you.”This account of the tense hours surrounding the exchange — the biggest between Moscow and the West since the Cold War — is based on new details revealed by Western government officials involved in the process, and on early testimony from the Russian political prisoners released as part of the deal. The swap freed Mr. Krasikov, the American journalist Evan Gershkovich and 22 others in a complex seven-country deal that required intricate planning and timing. The successful transfer highlighted the ability of some of the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies to cooperate on a distinct operation of shared interest, even as Russia and the West engage in a tense standoff over the war in Ukraine.A photograph released by the Russian state news media showing the convicted killer Vadim Krasikov, center right in hat, at a Moscow airport on Thursday.Mikhail Voskresensky/Sputnik, via ReutersWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kremlin Confirms Assassin Vadim Krasikov Is an Agent for Russia’s FSB

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      Vadim Krasikov, who was returned to Russia in the big prisoner swap, received a hero’s welcome from President Putin, along with others who were freed.The convicted assassin who was the linchpin of the biggest prisoner swap in decades is a member of the most powerful security agency in Russia, the Kremlin acknowledged on Friday, and had served in a special unit with some agents who now guard President Vladimir V. Putin.The ties help explain Mr. Putin’s determination to free the assassin, Vadim Krasikov, from the German prison where he was serving time for murder. The effort culminated on Thursday when Mr. Krasikov and seven other former prisoners returned to Moscow after an exchange with Western nations that involved 24 adults and seven countries.This was the first time that Moscow had admitted that Mr. Krasikov had been working for the Russian state in the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., an agency that is a successor to the Soviet K.G.B., in which Mr. Putin served in the early stage of his career. The F.S.B. was also the agency that was at the center of the negotiations with the C.I.A. about the swap, Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said.Mr. Putin has not hid his admiration for Mr. Krasikov, who had been jailed in Germany since 2019 for the murder of a Chechen former separatist fighter in Berlin. In an interview in February, Mr. Putin referred to Mr. Krasikov as “a patriot” who was doing his duty by eliminating an enemy of the Russian state.When the freed prisoners arrived at Vnukovo International Airport in Moscow at about 10:30 Thursday night, Mr. Putin hugged Mr. Krasikov, the first of the freed to disembark the plane.In a photo released by Russian state media, President Putin is shown at the airport welcoming Russians released in a big prisoner swap with the West.Pool photo by Mikhail Voskresenskiy/EPA, via ShutterstockWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Behind the Deal: Spies, a Killer, Secret Messages and Unseen Diplomacy

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      The negotiations that led to the prisoner swap and the freeing of Americans wrongfully held in Russia required patience and creativity, but gave both sides what they wanted most.A turning point came on June 25, when a group of C.I.A. officers sat across from their Russian counterparts during a secret meeting in a Middle Eastern capital.The Americans floated a proposal: an exchange of two dozen prisoners sitting in jails in Russia, the United States and scattered across Europe, a far bigger and more complex deal than either side had previously contemplated but one that would give both Moscow and Western nations more reasons to say yes.Quiet negotiations between the United States and Russia over a possible prisoner swap had dragged on for more than a year. They were punctuated by only occasional glimpses of hope for the families of the American prisoners — including Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and Paul Whelan, an American security contractor — growing increasingly impatient for their ordeal to end. Those hopes were always dashed when one of the two sides balked.But the June meeting changed things, according to accounts from American and Western officials and other people familiar with the long process of bringing the deal to fruition.The Russian spies took the proposal back to Moscow, and only days later the C.I.A. director was on the phone with a Russian spy chief agreeing to the broad parameters of a massive prisoner swap. On Thursday, seven different planes touched down in Ankara, Turkey, and exchanged passengers, bringing to a successful close an intensive diplomatic effort that took place almost entirely out of public view.The deal between longtime adversaries — negotiated mostly by spies and sometimes through secret messages hand-delivered by couriers — secured the release of Mr. Gershkovich, Mr. Whelan and 14 other Americans, Russians and Europeans imprisoned in Russia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Evan Gershkovich’s Conviction in Russia Won’t Stop Journalists From Seeking the Truth

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      The only surprise in the guilty verdict against Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal correspondent who was arrested in Russia last year on phony charges of espionage, was that it came so quickly. The charge itself was a farce. No evidence was ever made public, the hearings were held in secret, and Mr. Gershkovich’s lawyers were barred from saying anything in public about the case.Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest, trial and conviction all serve President Vladimir Putin’s goal of silencing any honest reporting from inside Russia about the invasion of Ukraine and of making Russians even warier of speaking with any foreigner about the war.Independent Russian news outlets have been almost entirely shut down and their journalists imprisoned or forced to leave the country, so foreign correspondents are among the few remaining sources of independent reporting from inside Russia. Mr. Gershkovich’s last published article before his arrest, on March 29, 2023, was headlined “Russia’s Economy Is Starting to Come Undone” — just the sort of vital independent journalism that challenges Mr. Putin’s claims of a strong and vibrant Russia fighting a just war.Russian prosecutors claimed that Mr. Gershkovich, acting on instructions from Washington, used “painstaking conspiratorial methods” to obtain “secret information” about Uralvagonzavod, a Russian weapons factory near Yekaterinburg, where he was arrested and tried.The existence of this massive industrial complex is well known, but the charge of espionage allowed Russian prosecutors to keep the entire proceeding secret while fueling Mr. Putin’s propaganda about efforts by the United States and Europe to destabilize Russia.Mr. Putin’s crackdown on free expression, especially about the war in Ukraine, is unrelenting. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Russia is the world’s fourth-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 22 in detention, including Mr. Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, a U.S.-Russian dual citizen and an editor with the U.S.-government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Navalny Allies Say He Was About to Be Freed in a Prisoner Exchange

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      A top aide to the Russian opposition leader who died this month said he could have been among several inmates swapped. The claim could not be independently confirmed.Aides to Aleksei A. Navalny asserted on Monday that the Russian opposition leader had been on the verge of being freed in a prisoner exchange with the West before he died earlier this month.Western officials were in advanced talks with the Kremlin on a deal that would have released Mr. Navalny along with two Americans in Russian prison, a top aide to the dead opposition leader, Maria Pevchikh, said in a video released on the Navalny team’s YouTube channel.As part of that deal, Ms. Pevchikh said, Germany would have released Vadim Krasikov, the man convicted of killing a former Chechen separatist fighter in a Berlin park in 2019. Mr. Putin praised Mr. Krasikov in his interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson this month, describing the convicted assassin as having been motivated by “patriotic sentiments.”Ms. Pevchikh’s assertions about a pending deal could not be independently confirmed. There was no immediate comment from any of the parties reportedly involved in the trade described by Ms. Pevchikh. A Kremlin spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.“Navalny was supposed to be free in the coming days,” Ms. Pevchikh, the chairwoman of Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said in the video. “I received confirmation that negotiations were at the final stage on the evening of Feb. 15.”American officials had acknowledged that German officials were asking for Mr. Navalny to be released in any deal that would have freed Mr. Krasikov, though they did not indicate a deal was close. A German government spokeswoman declined to comment when asked about the Navalny team’s assertions at a news conference on Monday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More