Putin, Vladimir V

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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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      Can Freed Russian Dissidents Help Energize Opposition Movement?

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      The release of activists like Ilya Yashin gives new hope to an movement in which various groups are often at war with each other. But many have doubts.Among Russians who oppose Vladimir V. Putin and his brutal Ukraine invasion, hopes are high that the Russian dissidents freed last week as part of a prisoner exchange with the West will breathe new life into a fragmented opposition force.But if it promises an injection of energy into a movement struggling to effect change inside of Russia, it reignites a question older than the Russian Revolution — where is the more effective place to advocate for democratic change: from a prison cell inside of Russia, or in exile?Either way, the challenge is daunting. For years, decades even, Russia’s opposition has been divided and beset with infighting; the Ukraine invasion has only exacerbated the grievances. And that was before the most influential opposition leader, Aleksei A. Navalny, died in an Arctic penal colony in February.The most prominent dissidents who remained — Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, both freed last week — were serving long sentences, but they gained credibility from their willingness to forego the comforts of exile to speak their minds as inmates in Russia’s harsh prison system.They were exchanged along with Andrei S. Pivovarov, who ran Open Russia, an organization founded by the exiled former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and three regional politicians with ties to Mr. Navalny. Its mission is to support Russian civil society.In an interview over the weekend, Mr. Yashin lamented that he had not wanted to leave Russia, and that his release, which he called an “illegal expulsion,” deprived his words of the moral authority they carried from prison. But his supporters expressed cautious optimism in the days after the exchange, because of his unifying power and that of Mr. Kara-Murza, who won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for columns he had written in prison for The Washington Post.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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      Trump Says Georgia’s Governor Is Hampering His Efforts to Win There

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      Former President Donald J. Trump suggested without evidence on Saturday that Georgia’s Republican governor was hampering his efforts to win the battleground state in November, a claim that carried echoes of Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat to President Biden there in 2020.“In my opinion, they want us to lose,” Mr. Trump said, accusing the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, and its secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who is also a Republican, of being disloyal and trying to make life difficult for him.At a rally at the Georgia State University Convocation Center in Atlanta, in a speech that lasted more than 90 minutes and that was peppered with grievances about his loss four years ago, Mr. Trump falsely claimed, “I won this state twice,” referring to the 2016 and 2020 elections.Mr. Trump lost to Mr. Biden by roughly 12,000 votes in Georgia in 2020. Last year, the former president was indicted by an Atlanta grand jury on charges related to his efforts to subvert the results of that election in that state. On Saturday, he complained that he might not have ended up in legal jeopardy if Mr. Kemp and Mr. Raffensperger had cooperated with his attempts to reverse the 2020 results.Mr. Trump added that he thought Georgia had slipped under Mr. Kemp’s leadership. “The state has gone to hell,” he said.Representatives for Mr. Kemp, who indicated in June that he had not voted for Mr. Trump in the Republican primary this year, and Mr. Raffensperger did not immediately respond to requests for comment.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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      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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      Fencing Feud Highlights Ukrainian-Russian Animosity at Olympics

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      The war has torn apart old alliances and heightened the acrimony. A Ukrainian fencer is competing after her refusal to shake hands with a Russian rival got her barred from the world championships.Olha Kharlan of Ukraine shouted in celebration under the vaulted glass dome of the Grand Palais on Monday, after an early round victory in her pursuit of a fifth career Olympic medal in saber fencing.She had reached the semifinals by late afternoon. But just her mere presence confirmed that this niche sport, perhaps more than any other, illustrates the acrimony and caustic feuding that have resulted from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Kharlan, 33, was disqualified from the world fencing championships last summer for refusing to shake hands with her Russian opponent. But Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee and himself a 1976 Olympic fencing champion, gave Kharlan an exemption to participate in the Paris Games, citing her “unique situation.”There she was on Monday, competing in the Olympics, while Russia was absent from the biggest international event in fencing, a sport in which it has long been a power athletically and administratively.Ohla Kharlan, right, competing against Shihomi Fukushima of Japan in the Grand Palais on Monday.Andrew Medichini/Associated PressWith Russia banned from these Games because of its invasion, only 15 of its athletes are competing in Paris, all designated as neutral, without the accompaniment of the country’s flag or national anthem. There are none in fencing, a huge blow to the country’s Olympic prestige given that Russia and the former Soviet Union rank behind only Italy, France and Hungary in fencing’s overall medal count.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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      Trump and Zelensky Speak by Phone as Ukraine Worries About U.S. Backing

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      Former President Donald J. Trump and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, spoke over the phone late this week amid mounting concern in Kyiv that a second Trump administration would spell the end of American support in Ukraine’s fight against Russia.Ukrainian officials worry that if a re-elected Mr. Trump kept to his vow to end the war quickly — he has suggested that he could end it in one day — it would allow Russia to keep the territory it occupies and leave it in a position to attack Ukraine again.In a social media post about the call, which took place on Friday, Mr. Trump said that, as president he would “bring peace to the world and end the war that has cost so many lives.” He said both Russia and Ukraine “will be able to come together and negotiate a deal that ends the violence.”Mr. Zelensky said in a statement on Friday that he had underlined in the call “the vital bipartisan and bicameral American support for protecting our nation’s freedom and independence.” He said he and Mr. Trump had agreed “to discuss at a personal meeting what steps can make peace fair and truly lasting.”It was the first call between Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Trump since the former American president left office in 2020. Although the Ukrainian authorities have tried to remain neutral in the U.S. presidential campaign, officials have started building bridges with Mr. Trump’s camp, hoping to shape his views on Ukraine.Oleksandr Kraiev, the head of the North America Program at Ukrainian Prism, a Kyiv-based think tank, said Ukrainian diplomats had been working on strategies to persuade Mr. Trump to continue supporting Ukraine, mindful that he can be unpredictable in foreign policy. The Republican Party’s platform does not include the word Ukraine, referring only to a broad goal of restoring “peace in Europe.”Mr. Kraiev said that Kyiv could frame its objectives as in being in line with two of Mr. Trump’s top interests: his image as a strong leader and his defense of the American economy.“We can connect with Trump on these two specific topics,” Mr. Kraiev said. More

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      After CrowdStrike Causes Outage, Are U.S. Networks Safe?

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      With each cascade of digital disaster, new vulnerabilities emerge. The latest chaos wasn’t caused by an adversary, but it provided a road map of American vulnerabilities at a critical moment.In the worst-case scenarios that the Biden administration has quietly simulated over the past year or so, Russian hackers working on behalf of Vladimir V. Putin bring down hospital systems across the United States. In others, China’s military hackers trigger chaos, shutting down water systems and electric grids to distract Americans from an invasion of Taiwan.As it turned out, none of those grim situations caused Friday’s national digital meltdown. It was, by all appearances, purely human error — a few bad keystrokes that demonstrated the fragility of a vast set of interconnected networks in which one mistake can cause a cascade of unintended consequences. Since no one really understands what is connected to what, it is no surprise that such episodes keep happening, each incident just a few degrees different from the last.Among Washington’s cyberwarriors, the first reaction on Friday morning was relief that this wasn’t a nation-state attack. For two years now, the White House, the Pentagon and the nation’s cyberdefenders have been trying to come to terms with “Volt Typhoon,” a particularly elusive form of malware that China has put into American critical infrastructure. It is hard to find, even harder to evict from vital computer networks and designed to sow far greater fear and chaos than the country saw on Friday.Yet as the “blue screen of death” popped up from the operating rooms of Massachusetts General Hospital to the airline management systems that keep planes flying, America got another reminder of the halting progress of “cyber resilience.” It was a particularly bitter discovery then that a flawed update to a trusted tool in that effort — CrowdStrike’s software to find and neutralize cyberattacks — was the cause of the problem, not the savior.Only in recent years has the United States gotten serious about the problem. Government partnerships with private industry were put together to share lessons. The F.B.I. and the National Security Agency, along with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Homeland Security Department, issue bulletins outlining vulnerabilities or blowing the whistle on hackers.President Biden even created a Cyber Safety Review Board that looks at major incidents. It is modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board, which reviews airplane and train accidents, among other disasters, and publishes “lessons learned.”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