East-West prisoner exchange brings home American journalist, returns convicted Russian hackers

A coordinated multilateral prisoner exchange between the U.S., Russian and other Western countries that returns Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershgovich, former Marine Paul Whelan and others back home in turn releases a pair of convicted Russian cybercriminals from U.S. custody.

Roman Seleznev and Vladislav Klyushin will be returned to Russia. Seleznev, in particular, was served two concurrent 14 year sentences — one of the largest sentences for charges related to cybercrime in U.S. history — when he was found in 2017 to have run a $50 million cyber fraud ring that involved distributing compromised credit card data.

Klyushin was handed a nine-year sentence last year for running a “hack-to-trade” scheme that let him steal some $93 million by hacking into U.S. firms and using their confidential data to game trades on the stock market.

A third U.S. prisoner exchanged to Russia, Vadim Konoshenko, was first detained by Estonian authorities via U.S. coordination after he was found to have evaded tech and armaments sanctions. Other foreign operatives linked to Russia’s intelligence agencies are also being returned from imprisonment in Germany, Slovenia, Norway and Poland.

Germany is releasing Vadim Krasikov, a FSB colonel who was serving a life sentence in for the daylight killing of a former Chechen fighter in a Berlin park.

The swap was coordinated through the Turkish National Intelligence Agency, marking the largest East-West prisoner exchange in the post-Cold War era. The National Security Council and Russia’s embassy in Washington, D.C. did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Gershkovich was taken into Russian custody in March 2023 and was later sentenced on espionage charges that the U.S., Wall Street Journal and Western journalism institutions vehemently denied. Whelan, the former Marine, was arrested by Russian authorities in 2018 on similar charges that the U.S. has deemed unsubstantiated.