On Thursday evening, a group of associates of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny gathered at Cologne airport, awaiting the arrival of a flight from Ankara carrying 13 people who had been held in Russian prisons until that morning, including three who had worked as Navalny’s regional coordinators in various Russian cities and who had been jailed on charges of “extremism.”
After being replaced in Turkey, they were released along with Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and two other Americans and boarded a separate flight home.
It was a moment of joy when the 13 people disembarked in Cologne. But beneath the melancholy and anger for the one person not on the flight, there was also a thought for Navalny: after all, the deal had been drawn up with him in mind, and then, just when his freedom seemed tantalizingly within reach, he died or was killed in prison.
With the exchange now complete, details have emerged showing how close a similar exchange involving Navalny came to fruition in February, after months of careful planning and Kremlin approval.
Detailed Wall Street Journal investigation Giving an inside look into the behind-the-scenes negotiations surrounding the exchange, the paper explained that its origins lie in a meeting in Geneva between the leaders of Russia and the United States, which took place shortly after Joe Biden became president and long before Gershkovich was arrested. At that meeting, Vladimir Putin proposed the establishment of a special channel to handle prisoner exchanges, reminiscent of Cold War practices. Biden agreed. Russia eventually released basketball player Brittney Griner, who was caught with a small amount of hash oil at a Moscow airport, in what appeared to be a calculated move to hold Americans hostage. She was exchanged for Viktor Bout, one of the world’s most notorious arms dealers, who was in U.S. custody.
Moscow next turned to Vadim Krasikov, an assassin who traveled to Germany under the identity document Vadim Sokolov and shot dead a Chechen defector in a park in 2019. He was arrested as he removed his wig and tried to flee the scene. The Kremlin denied any connection, and the assassin refused to talk during questioning. Journalist Kristo Grozev cracked the case and identified him as Krasikov, a member of an elite unit of Russia’s security service, the FSB.
Grozev made a name for himself tracking Russian spies and assassins, and befriended Navalny after exposing the FSB death squad that had been tailing him for months before he was poisoned with Novichok in 2020. After the attack, Navalny fled to Germany, where he recuperated before returning to Russia in early 2021. He was quickly arrested and jailed.
Mr. Grozev became one of the leading advocates for Mr. Navalny to be included in any prisoner swap, believing him to hold the key to persuading Germany that Mr. Krasikov was worth extraditing, especially because his release could galvanize Russia’s divided opposition.
“There are a lot of problems with this, but on the other side of it you have Navalny, who has a real chance of playing a role in Russia’s political future in the coming years, if not months,” Grozev told the Guardian in a phone interview on Friday.
He began broaching the idea with Russian acquaintances who were eager to act as intermediaries for a possible exchange, but hit a wall whenever Navalny’s name came up. “I worked with at least two former security officials who were in a position to quickly replace Putin with a handshake, and they all wanted that credibility, but Alexei’s name was a source of fear for both of them,” Grozev said.
Grozev then asked Roger Carstens, the U.S. presidential envoy for hostage negotiators, if he could ask Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich to raise the issue with Putin, The Wall Street Journal reported. Abramovich was already considered a solid conduit to Putin, having been an active participant in informal negotiations on a peace deal with Ukraine at the start of the war and later in prisoner exchange talks with Kiev. Carstens raised the issue with Abramovich when the two were in Israel after the Oct. 7 attacks, The Journal reported.
“Mr Abramovich initially said that Mr Putin would not agree and then discouraged him from asking Mr Carstens to deliver the message. But Mr Carstens is so passionate about the cause and ideals and knew that no one else would ask the question so he begged him to ask. And a few days later, to his surprise, Mr Abramovich reported that Mr Carstens had agreed,” Grozev said.
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A Moscow source familiar with the negotiations confirmed that Putin approved the deal in principle in the fall. “Germany didn’t want to let go of Krasikov, but they had Navalny, a world-famous figure who was well known in Germany, and that was for sale. It was a fortunate combination of circumstances: Putin got Krasikov, Germany got Navalny, and the U.S. got the U.S. back,” the source said.
With that go-ahead, everything started to fall into place. They asked their allies, Slovenia and Norway, to include Russian spies arrested in their countries in the exchange. They broadened the scope of the exchange to make the idea of Krasikov’s release more palatable to the German government. “It always had to be a package big enough, vague enough so that no country would incur a particular domestic political risk,” Grozev said.
A Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that the negotiations involved multiple parties in Washington, Berlin and Moscow and remained delicate and tense. A surprisingly big role was played by Ella Millman, Gershkovich’s mother, who tirelessly lobbied U.S. authorities to keep the imprisoned journalist in mind. In January, Millman flew to the World Economic Forum in Davos to meet Wolfgang Schmidt, chief of staff to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. “You have the keys,” she told Schmidt. Schmidt promised to cooperate, and Scholz and Biden spoke by phone the same day. “I’m going to do this for you,” Scholz later told Biden, according to the Journal.
Ultimately, Grozev said, an 8-8 deal was in sight: Those released by Russia would have included Navalny, Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, but a group of Russians similar to those seen this week would return to Moscow.
Once everything was in place, Abramovich went back to Putin for final approval, and again the response was positive: “He agreed in principle at an early stage and gave his approval at the final stage when everything was ready,” a Moscow source said.
Then came the shocking news: Alexei, 47, had died of unknown causes in the remote Arctic prison where he was being held. “On the evening of February 15th, we received confirmation that negotiations were at the final stage,” Maria Pevchikh, a close aide to Navalny, said earlier this year. “On February 16th, Alexei was murdered.”
In the months since Navalny’s death, a new agreement has slowly begun to take shape, drawing in more of Russia’s opposition and bringing Germany back on side. The deal reached on Thursday came after months of careful negotiations in multiple capitals.
Grozev, who was in Cologne to greet the plane as it arrived from Ankara, said after Navalny’s death it was hard to judge whether the exchange, which essentially rewarded Putin’s hostage policy, was a good decision. “Now that Navalny is gone it’s harder to judge what the balance is now,” he said.
Speaking to the Guardian by phone on his way to buy clothes for Russian political prisoners who arrived in their prison uniforms, he said that despite doubts, it was still a good thing that so many prisoners had been released. “There was a moral obligation to use the accumulated resources and the German willingness, under certain conditions, to free Krasikov and as many others as possible,” he said.
