‘This is breaking him’: Putin’s prisoner swap leaves hundreds behind

“It’s been 48 hours of a rollercoaster ride; it’s been exhausting,” Anne Fogel said. 

Unlike three fellow Americans, her brother, Marc Fogel — a 63-year-old former teacher at the Anglo-American School of Moscow — was not handed a ticket to freedom this week.

He was arrested in August 2021 and charged with smuggling marijuana — a U.S. medical prescription for back pain was not enough to stave off a 14-year sentence.

As rumors began to swirl early this week about an impending prisoner swap, the horrible reality sunk in for Anne that her brother would be left out of the third exchange in a row.

“Marc is curling up now, he said he’s giving up. I know him to be a resilient person and I know he’ll come out of it, but it’s heartbreaking,” she told POLITICO on Friday. “This is breaking him.”

Thursday’s dramatic deal was cheered by many in the West and in Russian circles, with 16 political detainees freed from the Kremlin’s clutches. 

How the final list of prisoners involved in the swap was compiled — eight foreign and dual citizens, and eight Russians — is a secret that tight-lipped diplomats might never divulge.

But what’s clear is that the bulk of about 1,000 political prisoners languishing in Russian detention centers and penal colonies never even got close.

For them and their supporters, this week’s historic trade offers a glimpse of hope — and simultaneously dashes their own prospects of a quick end to their own hell.

While foreign detainees have the highest international profiles, most political hostages in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s prisons are Russian. To the outside world, and to a large segment of state-TV watching Russian society, they are invisible. To their marginalized but often stoic campaigners, they are heroes.

One person whom many were surprised to learn wasn’t included in a swap is opposition politician Alexei Gorinov, the first to be given a hefty prison sentence (seven years) in July 2022 for criticizing Russia’s assault on Ukraine.

Still in a detention center in Vladimir, east of Moscow, today and suffering from a chronic lung disease, Gorinov, 63, was recently slapped with new charges, this time for “publicly justifying terrorism” after discussing the Ukraine war with other inmates. 

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin welcomes Russian citizens released in a major prisoner swap with the West. | Kirill Zykov/AFP via Getty Images

Beside Gorinov there are many other prominent prisoners. Some, like Yury Dmitriev, a historian of Soviet repression, were jailed years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Others have become victims of Russia’s wartime clampdown on free speech, like theater figures Yevgenia Berkovich and Svetlana Petrichuk, accused of “justifying terrorism” in a play.

Taken together, their cases — and hundreds of others — map the Kremlin’s expanding wave of repression which has left no part of society untouched and shows no sign of subsiding.

Gorinov’s lawyer, Denis Shedov, told POLITICO he had not gotten through to his client since before the swap. But, like many others, he confessed to having “mixed feelings.” It was a positive development that some of Russia’s most prominent opposition figures were now free, he said.

“For them personally, but also for Russians, to see that their democratic leaders won’t die in prison and there is some hope for change.”

But it would not change the direction of Putin’s regime at home. “Repression is a part of their policy,” he said. 

In April, the prison authorities suddenly placed his client on suicide watch, for no clear reason and to Gorinov’s own alarm. “He asked me to tell everyone that if something were to happen to him, that it wasn’t suicide,” Shedov said. “That he loves his life and has plans for the future.”

A unique event 

This week’s deal was exceptional in its complexity and scale. With seven governments involved, spanning three continents, and a total of 24 people exchanged, the swap is a unique event in Russian, U.S. and German history and the biggest since the Cold War.

Coming amid calls for a peace deal with Ukraine, even in some Western quarters, the message that Russia is a reliable bargaining partner is one the Kremlin is eager to promote. 

A closer look at the swap suggests otherwise. 

Originally, the swap was meant to have included Alexei Navalny, as the allies of the late opposition politician are keen to make clear, and U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan confirmed on Thursday.

The assumption was that Putin would be prepared to swap him for Vadim Krasikov, an FSB hitman convicted to a life sentence in Germany for murdering a Chechen dissident.

Thursday’s dramatic prisoner swap was cheered by many in the West and in Russian circles. | POOL photo by Mikhail Voskresenskiy/AFP via Getty Images

But as talks were reportedly ongoing, in December last year Navalny suddenly went missing, then reappeared in a penal colony in the Arctic and within weeks mysteriously died. 

According to Navalny’s team, Putin actively approved the murder of Navalny, assuming it would not stand in the way of getting Krasikov released. If that was the case, he was right. 

It is a convention that prisoner swaps should mirror each other — soldier for soldier, spy for spy. But this week’s exchange upended that unspoken rule.

Russia on Thursday put on a plane journalists, politicians and a historian, among others. In return later that evening, Putin gave a red carpet welcome home to Russia’s spies, cybercriminals and a murderer with proven ties to the Kremlin. 

Rather than appear embarrassed by the contrast, Moscow made a spectacle of it. Putin personally greeted the returning ex-prisoners on the Vnukovo airport tarmac and brought his top defense and security chiefs with him.

He gave Krasikov a comradely hug and told the group he would be discussing their “futures” with them soon.  

In Putin’s Russia, patriots are rewarded with state awards and political positions.

And traitors removed: either by sudden death, as in Navalny’s case; by jailing, or, if they are extremely lucky, as on Thursday, by a once-in-a blue-moon swap. 

Аlexander Baunov, a former Russian diplomat who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said that with the prisoner exchange, the Kremlin is signaling to Russians that they “shouldn’t be afraid to commit crimes in the name of the regime, the Motherland will bail them out.” 

At a press conference in Bonn on Friday, Ilya Yashin, one of the Russian dissidents who was freed, was visibly torn about the price which would be paid for him walking free. 

“Of course this motivates Putin to take new people hostage, of course this motivates Putin to increase the number of political prisoners!” he told journalists emotionally. “That’s what dictators do.”

Years of negotiations

Getting all sides to agree to the swap reportedly took years and the chances of a repeat anytime soon are slim. 

For Marc Fogel’s sister, Anne, it is a bitter disappointment. She remains angry, believing the American government prioritized the release of dissident Russians over getting her brother home. “We played our hand,” she said. 

Kremlin critics who still enjoy their freedom will do well to tread carefully, now a few prison cells have become vacant. Even as talks on the swap must have been entering their final stages, Russian authorities launched new cases against several journalists over supposed ties to Navalny. 

Those cases come on top of those of Daniel Kholodny, a TV technician for Navalny’s YouTube channel, and three of Navalny’s lawyers, all of whom sit in jail.

“This is not a thaw or an act of humaneness,” Russian journalist Dmitry Kolezev wrote of the prisoner exchange. “[The Kremlin] needed their spies back — so they collected hostages and exchanged some of them. Others will remain in jail.” 

The good news for them is that the swap suggests there are Western governments prepared to help them. 

The bad news: Putin knows it, too.