No spies to trade: America’s unprecedented shortage of valuable prisoners hits

February 1962. Rudolf Abel was crossing the Glienicke Bridge, between what was then West Berlin and East Berlin. The Soviet spy, who four years earlier had been captured in New York by the FBI, was exchanged for the pilot US Gary Powers, arrested in Moscow for also carrying out espionage work.

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December 2022. American basketball player Brittney Griner, arrested in Moscow for possession of cannabis oil, is exchanged in Abu Dhabi for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, the infamous ‘merchant of death’, after months of tense negotiations and with the war in Ukraine as a backdrop.

If what happened six decades ago was one of the most significant spy exchanges of the Cold War, what happened a few months ago was clearly an unfair exchange between a sportswoman and a high-profile criminal.

In December last year, prisoners Brittney Griner (in red and with his back turned) and Viktor Bout (with an envelope in his hands) were exchanged at the Abu Dhabi airport (United Arab Emirates). (video capture)

After that, it seems that the United States ran out of caliber prisoners to be able to exchange them for other detainees who continue to serve sentences in Russia. One of them is Paul Whelan, a former US Marine arrested in 2018 and sentenced to 16 years in prison. The most recent, and which has caused consternation, is the case of Evan Gershkovich, a journalist for “The Wall Street Journal”, arrested on March 29 while investigating the activities of the Wagner Group, the Kremlin’s mercenary army, in Yekaterinburg.

Both have been accused of espionage and have become a real headache for the Biden administration.

A recent CNN investigation points out with concern that, indeed, the Americans do not have prisoners who can be exchanged for Whelan or Gershkovich, and that this is being used by Moscow to put more pressure on Washington.

Is it possible that the US has run out of worthy Russian spies in its jails?

According to current and former US officials questioned by CNN, there are about 60 Russian hackers and cybercriminals detained in the country, but they are not considered important by the Kremlin to be part of an exchange. Russia wants more.

political pressure

“The fact that Russia has more captured Americans is because they are not really spies but hostages, whom it accuses of being spies to use them to negotiate with the US and have them hand over real spies,” the newspaper told this newspaper. international analyst Roberto Heimovits.

“Russia stopped being a democracy several years ago, and this hostage-taking is encouraged by the government. Doing this in the United States would be much more difficult because they have an independent judiciary, and capturing innocent Russian citizens would be more difficult, as well as using them as bargaining chips,” he adds.

Jesús Ágreda Rudenko, a professor at the Faculty of International and Political Studies at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, holds a similar opinion: “Yes, it is possible that the United States has run out of high-value prisoners for Russia, and the reason is simple: the way the Russian judicial system works. There, arrests that could appear arbitrary have been made against people who are used as a mechanism for political pressure. It is usual for arrests to be made under any pretext.”

This could frame the capture of basketball player Griner, a well-known figure in her country and whose arrest caused a great deal of commotion among American public opinion, which was pressing for her release. The same is happening now with the journalist Gershkovich, since the main media outlets do not stop demanding her freedom.

“Russia, which is an authoritarian state, takes advantage of the sensibility of a democratic system, and the popular participation in those democratic systems, and gets a huge advantage by detaining people at random, and in return they get high-value prisoners, like Viktor Bout , which was exchanged for the basketball player”, points out Ágreda Rudenko.

in search of allies

Meanwhile, the United States is turning to its allies in order to obtain interchangeable prisoners. One of them is in Germany and, according to reports, there are already negotiations underway for his extradition. This is Vadim Krasikov, a former colonel of the Federal Security Service (SFB) sentenced to life imprisonment after the murder, in 2019, of a Georgian citizen in a park in Berlin.

According to the federal prosecutor’s office in charge of terrorism and espionage cases, Vadim Krasikov was entrusted to “liquidate” the Georgian Tornike Kavtarashvili (40) on behalf of “organizations linked to the central government of the Russian Federation.” (Photo: Bellingcat)

Krasikov’s name was even in the negotiations for the Griner-for-Bout trade, which also included Whelan, but it didn’t come to fruition.

Another name circulating is that of Sergey Cherkasov, who posed as a Brazilian postgraduate student at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, and who was detained by the Netherlands while trying to join none other than the International Criminal Court.

Although Russia has suffered several casualties in its spy networks, they have not lowered their guard in their attempts to continue infiltrating the hearts of governments they consider to be enemies. So, even as the war in Ukraine continues, the Kremin knows it has an advantage in his bargaining power, while Washington feels even more pressure as it tries to secure the safe return of his compatriots.

“It is likely that the journalist and the ex-marine will continue to be detained for much longer,” reflects Heimovits. “Not only because the US would not have someone important to offer right now, but because of the profound deterioration in relations between the two countries due to the war in Ukraine, unless they get lucky and the FBI manages to suddenly disrupt a new spy network.”

Source: Elcomercio