The prisoner exchange reported by US media to be underway on Thursday between Russia and the United States continues a long history of swaps between Moscow and the West. Here’s a look at the main prisoner swaps since the Cold War:
December 2022:
US basketball star Brittney Griner, now 33, spent nine months in a Russian jail before being freed in December 2022 in an exchange at the Abu Dhabi airport for convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. She had been arrested at a Moscow airport in February 2022, one week before the invasion of Ukraine, and sentenced in August 2022 to nine years in jail on charges of smuggling cannabis vape cartridges into the country. Several days after her release, US citizen Suedi Murekezi was freed as well as 64 Ukrainian military members in a Ukraine prisoner swap with Russian forces. He had been arrested in June 2022 in Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine and convicted of taking part in pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian demonstrations.
April 2022:
Trevor Reed, who had been jailed for nine years for assaulting police, was released in April 2022 in a prisoner swap in Turkey with Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot and alleged drug smuggler who was sentenced to 20 years in prison by an American court. Reed, now in his 30s, was a Texas university student in 2019 when he traveled to Russia with his Russian girlfriend. He was arrested for assault on law enforcement officers after getting drunk and spent two years in prison, going on a hunger strike in November 2021.
July 2010:
On July 9, 2010, Russia and the United States carried out their biggest spy swap since the fall of the Iron Curtain at the Vienna airport, exchanging 10 agents deported by the US for four freed by Moscow. In the highly choreographed cloak-and-dagger operation, special Russian and US flights carried the spies to Vienna, parked next to each other on the runway, then took off within 15 minutes of each other after the exchange by shuttle bus. A government jet flew the 10 Russian spies, including Anna Chapman, who cultivated a femme fatale image as a business executive before her arrest, back to Moscow’s Domodedovo airport. The four released by Russia included three convicted of spying for the West. Among them was Sergei Skripal, a former colonel with Russian military intelligence whose 2018 poisoning in southern England, where he had taken refuge, sparked a diplomatic crisis between Russia and the West. Several Western countries have accused Moscow of being behind the assassination attempt of the former double agent, something that Moscow has denied.
The Cold War: The Bridge of Spies
Before the end of the Cold War in 1991, prisoner swaps were a regular occurrence between Moscow and the West, but they mainly involved spies. Prisoner exchanges regularly took place on the iron Glienicke Bridge that linked West Berlin with Soviet-controlled Potsdam over the Havel river. The first memorable spy swap of the Soviet era took place there on February 10, 1962, involving one of the most famous Soviet spies, Rudolf Abel, and American pilot Gary Powers. Director Steven Spielberg turned their story into a blockbuster, “Bridge of Spies”, in 2015. On June 11, 1985, 25 East German political prisoners crossed paths on the bridge with four East Bloc agents convicted in the United States. The most spectacular swap on the bridge, however, took place on February 11, 1986, when Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky was exchanged for Czech spy couple Karl and Hana Koecher, who were held in the US, and three spies held in West Germany. Sharansky had spent nine years in a Siberian gulag on charges of spying for the US. He immediately emigrated to Israel, where he went into politics.
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