Three U.S. citizens to be released

The United States has confirmed that 24 people are involved in the case prisoner exchange between Russia and some Western countries such as the United States and Germany.

The released prisoners include U.S. citizens Alvin Gershkovich (reporter for the Wall Street Journal) and Former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan.

As part of the deal, Germany released Russian security service killer Vadim Krasikov.

Speculation about a major swap between Russia and the West has been building for days, intensifying after several prisoners were moved from their cells in a Russian prison to an unknown location.

American journalist Evan Gershkovich Earlier this month, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison in a high-security penal colony after being convicted of espionage.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter was arrested by security services last March while first reporting in the city of Yekaterinburg, about 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) east of Moscow.

Prosecutors accuse him of working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a charge that Gershkovich, the Journal and the U.S. government strongly deny.

This is the first time an American journalist has been convicted of espionage in Russia since the end of the Cold War more than 30 years ago. After his initial arrest, he was imprisoned in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison.

Paul WhelanThe 54-year-old was arrested in Moscow in 2018 on suspicion of espionage and sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2020.

The former U.S. Marine is a citizen of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland. His lawyer said he was being held in a prison in the Mordovia region.

In 2008, he was discharged from the military for misconduct, became a security consultant, and began traveling to Russia to work.

In December 2018, he was arrested by Russia’s FSB state security agency, which claimed he was “carrying out espionage” in Moscow. His family has always denied the accusations.

On the same day, Russian-American journalist Gershkovich was convicted. Arsu Kumasheva After a secret trial he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison in a medium security prison.

She was the editor of the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was convicted of spreading false information about Russian troops.

Her husband, Pavel Butorin, previously said she was arrested over a book published last year, a collection of stories about Russians opposing the war in Ukraine.

Ms. Kurmasheva holds U.S. and Russian citizenship and lives in Prague with her husband and two daughters. She was detained in Russia in June 2023 while visiting her mother.

Vladimir Kara-Murza is a prominent Russian dissident and one of the most outspoken opponents of Putin’s regime and an outspoken critic of the war in Ukraine and Russia’s domestic crackdown on dissent.

In 2023, the 42-year-old was sentenced to 25 years in prison for spreading “false” information about the Russian army and belonging to a “bad organization”.

Mr Karamurza, a former journalist and politician, has denied all accusations.

The dual British-Russian citizen had been serving time in a Siberian prison and his wife said he suffered from neurological problems as a result of the poisoning.

One of Russia’s most prominent opposition figures, Ilya Yashin, was jailed in 2022 for “spreading fake news about the country’s military.”

He was arrested after Bouchar denounced alleged Russian war crimes.

After former opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in prison, Yassin said he feared for his life.

He had previously accused President Vladimir Putin of being “mad with power” in a series of letters from the prison in the western region of Smolensk where he is being held.

Oleg Orlov is a Russian human rights activist who was jailed in February for calling Russia a fascist state and criticizing the war in Ukraine. He previously served as president of the Nobel Laureate Organization Memorial.

The 71-year-old was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “repeatedly smearing” the Russian armed forces.

In his July appeal against the verdict, he compared Russia’s justice system to that of Nazi Germany.

His sentencing follows a retrial. At a preliminary hearing last October, he was fined 150,000 rubles (£1,290; $1,630) and walked away from court. His subsequent conviction marked a harsher crackdown on opponents of the war.

Earlier this year, Lilia Chanysheva was charged by authorities with extremism crimes and sentenced to nine and a half years in prison.

She served as local coordinator for the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption network.

Initially sentenced to seven years in prison in 2023, prosecutors appealed the sentence, telling officials it was too light. She was recently held in a center in the Perm region.

Ms. Chanisheva is the first of Mr. Navalny’s allies to be sentenced on that charge. Most of his fellow activists have fled Russia into exile.

Ksenia Fadeyeva was sentenced to nine years in prison by authorities on charges of organizing an extremist group.

She was a local organizer for the Alexei Navalny Anti-Corruption Foundation in the Siberian city of Tomsk, where she was subsequently detained.

Her lawyers argued that she had ended her association with the group before it was designated an extremist organization in 2021.

Most of Navalny’s former staff and allies have been forced to flee Russia into exile in recent years as the Kremlin has stepped up its crackdown on opposition groups.

Sascha Kocilenko Last November, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for replacing supermarket pricing labels with anti-war messages in protest.

The label change drew attention to the deaths of civilians in Mariupol and said Russia had become a “fascist state.”

The artist from St. Petersburg has been held in the city’s detention center since April 2023.

German-Russian citizen Kevin Lik was convicted of treason as a teenager, becoming the youngest person ever convicted of the crime.

He grew up in Germany and moved to Russia when he was 12 years old.

In December, authorities sentenced him to four years in prison for allegedly emailing photos to “foreign representatives” before and throughout Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The court claimed that he visited and photographed “deployment sites” of Russian troops.

Rico Krieger, a German national Accused of burying explosives Sentenced to death in Belarus, he was pardoned by the country’s leader Alexander Lukashenko earlier this week.

In carefully crafted interviews with state-controlled media, he said he was acting on instructions from Ukraine but offered no evidence.

He is believed to be the first Western citizen of Belarus to be sentenced to death.

Russian opposition activist Andrei Pivovarov led open russia foundationThe group’s founder is former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent ten years in prison for opposing Putin.

In 2021, he was arrested after trying to leave the country from St. Petersburg and accused of leading a “bad organization”.

According to Agence France-Presse, Voronin, a Russian-German citizen, was sentenced to 13 years in prison for “treason”. Moscow accused him of receiving confidential military information from another journalist, Ivan Safronov. Fronov remains in prison.

Other German citizens released by Russia include:

• Patrick Schoebel was detained in St. Petersburg earlier this year after reportedly being found with a package of marijuana gummy bears.
• Herman Moyzhes, a Russian-German immigration lawyer who faces treason charges after his arrest in May
• Vadim Ostanin, the former head of one of Alexei Navalny’s regional branches, was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2023.

Federal Security Service (FSB) agent Vadim Krasikov is one of the most high-profile prisoners to be released back to Russia. Serving life sentence in Germany In 2019, an exiled Chechen commander was murdered in a Berlin park.

During the trial, prosecutors said he was acting on orders from Russia and that he belonged to the highly secretive Vympel unit of the Federal Security Service.

Lawyers defending him insisted he was a construction worker, not a killer. He denied that his name was Krasikov and called himself Vadim Sokolov, which was the name on the passport he carried when traveling.

In a recent interview with US talk show host Tucker Carlson, Putin suggested that Russia was seeking the release of “patriot” Krasikov in exchange for US journalist Evan Gershkovic.

Novels of Si Seleznev Found guilty of carrying out hacking scheme In 2017 it caused losses of $169m (£131m).

U.S. officials said he stole credit card data from restaurants and sold it on the black market. Prosecutors said he carried out the scheme between 2009 and 2013, for which he was sentenced to 27 years in prison.

According to the Justice Department, Seleznev used software to steal millions of credit card numbers from thousands of businesses.

His father is Valery Seleznev, a lawmaker and an ally of Mr. Putin.

U.S. charges Vadim Konoszchenok 2022 for conspiracy related to purchases and money laundering on behalf of the Russian government.

He is also believed to be an FSB agent.

At the time, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a statement saying that he and others illegally purchased and exported highly sensitive electronic components, some of which could be used for military purposes.

Couple Artem Viktorovich Dultsev and Anna Valerevna Dultseva were arrested in Slovenia and convicted of espionage.

They were each sentenced to 19 months in prison. Their two children also returned to Russia with them.

University lecturer Mikhail Valeryevich Mikushin was accused of posing as a Brazilian academic in Norway in 2022 to collect intelligence on behalf of Russia.

Norwegian officials said he holds a Brazilian passport and has been working as a researcher at the University of Tromso since 2021.

His name is reportedly José Assis Giammaria.

Mr Mikushin is also believed to have lied about his age and was in fact 44, not 37, at the time of the charges.

There is less public information about the other Russians involved in the exchange.

Vladislav Klyushin, who was sentenced to nine years in prison in the United States for insider trading, was also included.

Hispanic-Russian journalist Pavel Alekseyevich Rubtsov was arrested in Poland in February 2022, shortly before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Polish authorities accused him of using his free press work as a cover for intelligence activities.

This story will be updated as more released inmates are named