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      Bob Woodward to Publish ‘War’ This Fall

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      Woodward, an author and journalist, has written more than 20 best selling books. His latest will focus on Ukraine, the Middle East, and the battle for the U.S. presidency.The author and journalist Bob Woodward will publish a new book this fall called “War,” his publisher, Simon & Schuster, announced on Wednesday. The book, which will be released on Oct. 15, will focus on Ukraine, the Middle East and the “raw cage-fight of politics” of the 2024 election.“For more than 50 years, Woodward has done groundbreaking reporting on every president, starting with Richard Nixon,” Jonathan Karp, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster and Woodward’s editor, said in a statement. “His work on the power of the presidency is unrivaled. With ‘War,’ Woodward illustrates the dramatic contrast he sees between Donald Trump and his opponents for the presidency — Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, making this a must-read before heading to the polls.”Simon & Schuster said Woodward’s new book would offer a behind the scenes look at President Biden’s efforts to manage the war in Ukraine and contain the conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Middle East, trying to deter the use of nuclear weapons and avoid “a rapid slide into World War III.”Woodward, an associate editor at The Washington Post, has been part of that newsroom for more than 50 years. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, the first for his coverage of Watergate and the second for coverage of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.Woodward has written more than 20 best selling books, according to the publisher; 15 of them have been No. 1 New York Times best sellers. More

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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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      Inside the prisoner exchange that set an American journalist free – podcast

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      When the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Yekaterinburg in March 2023, he became the first American journalist in Russia charged with espionage since the end of the cold war. The Guardian’s Russian affairs reporter, Pjotr Sauer, had been talking to his friend Evan that very morning. And, as he explains to Michael Safi, he has spent much of the past 16 months still in contact with Evan – but now in the form of letters sent to a Moscow prison. Gershkovich’s sham trial ended after only two days in July with a 16-year sentence. But ironically – for Pjotr and Evan’s other friends and family – it was a moment of hope: hope that Evan’s case had been rushed through because he was being readied for a historic prisoner exchange. More

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      Ukraine Has Received F-16 Fighter Jets, Zelensky Says

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      President Volodymyr Zelensky did not say whether the jets had already flown combat missions. A shortage of trained pilots and a limited number of jets will constrain their immediate impact.President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Sunday that his army had received a first batch of F-16 fighter jets. The long-awaited arrival of the Western-supplied jets should bolster the country’s defenses, although Kyiv appears to have received too few of them so far to have an immediate impact on the battlefield.“F-16s are in Ukraine. We did it,” Mr. Zelensky said in a video posted on social media networks showing him at an air base addressing and meeting Ukrainian pilots. He was standing in front of two F-16s, and two more flew overhead as he spoke.At the very least, the arrival of the jets will boost Ukrainians’ morale, which has been dampened by months of slow but steady Russian advances on the battlefield and devastating attacks on the country’s power grid.Mr. Zelensky said Ukrainian pilots “have already started using them for our country,” but he did not say whether they had already flown combat missions in Ukraine. Nor did he say how many jets had arrived in the country.Ukraine hopes the F-16s, highly versatile aircraft equipped with advanced radar systems and a variety of weapons, will help turn the tide on the battlefield, where Russia has held the upper hand for much of the past year.The presence of the jets will pose a new threat to Russian pilots and help deter them from entering Ukrainian airspace to attack troops on the front line and in cities. The F-16s are also expected to improve Ukraine’s ability to shoot down Russian missiles, easing the pressure on its weakened air defense systems.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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      ‘Soul-crushing’: US families of those left out of Russia prisoner swap dispirited

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      As many as 20 US citizens were left out of Thursday’s complex, multi-country prisoner swap with western American allies and Russia, leading those excluded from the deal and their families to express deep disappointment.Among those left behind are Marc Fogel, a US high school teacher from Pennsylvania convicted of smuggling 17 grams of marijuana into Russia and sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2022.Fogel’s name had been included in prisoner swap discussions but his family did not know if he was included by US state department officials. A call from Fogel himself informed them he was not a part of the deal.Being excluded, he told his family, was “soul crushing”, according to the Wall Street Journal.Pennsylvania US senator Bob Casey said that while the prisoner swap was good news for Americans Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, “Marc Fogel is still sitting in a Russian prison”.Casey asked the Joe Biden White House to also prioritize Fogel’s release. “While Marc’s name may not be in the news every day, he is no less deserving of a reunion with his family,” the senator said. “This is a difficult day for Marc and his family.”The choices of who to prioritize in prisoner swap deals is uniquely sensitive, at times depending on a US-determined designation of “wrongfully detained”, which Fogel is not. At other times, a sometimes brutal – but often unstated – calculus about political value to the US becomes a factor.After Thursday’s releases, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, strode along the red carpet between two rows of rifle-toting honor guards to warmly greet intelligence operatives freed by the deal.“The Motherland hasn’t forgotten about you for a minute,” Putin said, embracing each of them after they walked down the steps of the jetliner that ferried them home, according to the Associated Press.In Washington, Biden and the vice-president Kamala Harris greeted the three freed US prisoners. To that point, the family of Paul Whelan has expressed disappointment that he had remained a Russian prisoner while Brittney Griner, the champion US basketball player, had returned home two years earlier in exchange for the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.A US state department spokesperson said that American diplomats were “not going to stop working” to free citizens “that continue to be wrongfully detained or held hostage around the world”.Those still held in Russia are believed to also include Andre Khachatoorian, arrested during a Moscow layover with a licensed, secured firearm in his checked luggage. Khachatoorian’s fiancée said she was “shocked” he was not freed.Ksenia Karelina – a dual US-Russian citizen who worked at a beauty spa in Los Angeles’ Beverly Hills – was arrested and charged with treason while visiting her family in February. Karelina had allegedly made a small financial donation to a humanitarian organization that Russian authorities say is connected to Ukraine’s military.Her boyfriend, Chris Van Heerden, told the Journal that he didn’t know if the 16-prisoner trade meant more exchanges would follow or “that her trial came too late and she was left behind”.Another US citizen, David Barnes, travelled to Moscow while in a custody battle with his Russian ex-wife. He was arrested in 2021 and sentenced to 21 years on allegations that he molested the couple’s children while the family lived in Texas.“I don’t really know what to tell him,” his sister Carol Barnes said to the Journal. “How do I explain that his government just left him behind?” 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