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00:00joined on set to talk a bit more about this by Robert Parsons from our
00:03International Affairs desk. So Rob this came as something of a surprise, there
00:09were obviously extensive backroom discussions going on leading up to this.
00:13Tell us a bit more about the circumstances. Yeah I think nobody was
00:18expecting anything on this scale. I mean we all knew that negotiations were going
00:22on for the release of Evan Gershkovich in particular and one assumed for Paul
00:27Whelan as well without actually knowing any of the details but it's been clear
00:32for several months now that something was afoot. It was said for instance back
00:36in February that the deal was in the making which would have
00:39included Alexei Navalny, a leading Russian dissident, who very quickly after
00:46the rumors started to appear online died, thereby being taken
00:51off the table as regards to any sort of deal involving him. But it was
00:56known that there were talks going on. It was notable for
01:00instance that during an interview with Tucker Carlson back in February Vladimir
01:06Putin, the Russian president, made it clear in a very arch way that Russia was
01:11prepared to do a deal and the deal would have to include, it was made fairly
01:16obvious by the Russians, the man you just referred to, Vadim Krasnikov, a colonel
01:23in the FSB, Russian intelligence, and an assassin who was arrested in Berlin in
01:302019 after killing a Chechen fighter from the Second Chechen War
01:39in broad daylight, virtually caught in the act, sentenced to prison for life.
01:45He, as part of this deal, will now be going free. But what I think has become
01:50clear from what Joe Biden, the US president, has been saying is that the
01:55backroom negotiations that were needed to get to that point have been colossal
02:00and if it hadn't been for a very close relationship among the allies involved,
02:05we're talking about Germany but there are others, Norway, Slovenia, Poland as
02:09well, if it hadn't been for that close relationship this deal would not have
02:13been made at all. And in particular he singled out German Chancellor
02:18Scholz for his role in making this possible. Germany had to overcome an
02:23ethical dilemma to let this happen, to release a man who had been sentenced to
02:28prison for murder in order to allow this to happen.
02:32Okay, tell us a bit more about who the US and the West have received in
02:38exchange then.
02:39Yeah, as you pointed out at the beginning, this is an enormous
02:43exchange, nothing like this since the days of the Cold War, not since 1985
02:48in fact, when 27 prisoners were exchanged. So it involves four Americans, five
02:55Germans and seven Russians, one of whom has joint British-Russian citizenship,
03:01Karamurza, and eight Russians. The eight Russians, apart from Krasnikov, are a
03:09mixture of petty criminals, hackers, cyber criminals and so on, small scale
03:17spies, who the Russians presumably just added on as padding to the deal. But I
03:23think one of the things that strikes me as most interesting about the deal is
03:28that this is not just similar to the Cold War in terms of the numbers
03:33involved, but similar to the type of prisoners who are being released, because
03:37of the seven Russians who have been released from Russia are all political
03:42prisoners. So that's very reminiscent of the sort of thing that was going on
03:46during the Cold War. Some of the most prominent political prisoners in Russia
03:49have been part of this deal. There are still many who are left there, but for
03:55the ones who have been released, obviously an enormous relief.