Letter From the Editors

Few virtues require more effort than patience, but few are quite so rewarding. This week, the families of 24 prisoners – 16 held in Russia and Belarus, and eight in the West – finally greeted their loved ones after a swap negotiated at the highest levels. The US and Russian heads of state could also say their patience was rewarded. As analyst Konstantin Kalachov put it, “Exchanges are an opportunity to show pragmatism, flexibility, and even humanity. . . . Each side can point to this as a success.”

Biden, an old hand at negotiations with Russia going back to the 1970s, claimed one more win even as circumstances compelled him not to run for reelection. As for Putin, the deal may have unveiled some of his deepest motivations.

In an interview with Republic, Israeli espionage expert Sergei Migdal paints the Russian president as intensely loyal to his fellow intelligence agents and assets in the field to the point that it warps his judgment as a negotiator. “ ‘Our guys’ – KGB and GRU agents . . . should know that if they get into trouble, we will rescue them no matter what” [Putin thinks].

According to Migdal, this was first apparent during the Anna Chapman swap in 2010 (although Putin was primarily negotiating not for Chapman, but for illegal agent Mikhail Vasenkov), in which Russia traded double agent Sergei Skripal: “Back in Soviet times, [Skripal] would have been shot. . . . It was very important for Putin to bring his agents home, since he agreed to pay such a high price.” Skripal’s subsequent woes notwithstanding, this was a significant departure from precedent that Putin agreed to despite protests from his top security advisers.

Obama, then still eager to continue the “reset” in US-Russia relations, also went over the heads of the FBI and DOJ in that deal, Migdal confirms. Biden, in turn, took flak when he traded arms dealer Viktor Bout for basketball player Brittney Griner. While Griner herself was of no political value to Russia, Migdal says “her case was a trial balloon,” because it broadened the range of prisoners who could be exchanged: “If Russia does not have genuine spies in prison, it simply grabs a random person . . . in order to use them as a bargaining chip,” and since the war in Ukraine started, “now it is a criminal offense to circulate false reports about the Russian military, and innocent people are convicted of treason for political reasons.”

With a growing pool of prisoners for exchange, Putin can afford to be not only innovative but generous in such dealings. Migdal believes the key figures in the current swap were, on the one hand, Americans Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich; and on the other, two agents caught in Slovenia and Vadim Krasikov, who killed a Chechen exile in Germany. “The others were add-ons,” he says. “Krasikov and the two illegals from Slovenia were obviously important to Putin, since he agreed to a lopsided deal.”

And to think, the reputed arch-cynic Putin is doing all this from a sense of loyalty. Migdal claims “this deal was important to Putin for personal, sentimental reasons. You don’t necessarily make such deals because you want this person to do something important for you. For example, what is Bout doing now that he has been released? It’s not like he is being parachuted behind enemy lines, grenade in hand.”

But sometimes released prisoners do find services to render. For example, Viktor Medvedchuk, whom Ukraine traded to Putin for POWs from Azovstal, is still hard at work as a political activist in exile, and he has written a new editorial. In it, he bemoans that “a semiliterate, primitive, greedy and boorish elite has been grown in Western test tubes.” If Medvedchuk’s “Other Ukraine” is not worried about “a state that never materialized, or its territorial integrity,” who should lead it? Who is waiting in the wings?