Russian prisoner swap raises debate over ramifications: ‘Are we actually feeding the beast?’

(WASHINGTON) — Two dozen prisoners from seven countries were freed in a historic swap on Thursday, including several wrongfully detained American citizens held in Russia.

President Joe Biden called the deal, the largest of its kind since the Cold War, “a feat of diplomacy and friendship.”

Among those released were two wrongfully detained American citizens held by Moscow — Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan — as well as Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist, and Vladimir Kara-Muza, a legal permanent resident of the U.S.

Alongside the celebration and relief of the prisoners returning home, the exchange of innocent Americans for Russian criminals raised the debate of whether this would encourage foreign adversaries to target and wrongfully detain Americans to use as leverage.

“It’s a plausible critique,” ABC News contributor Elizabeth Neumann, a former Homeland Security official, said. “Are we actually feeding the beast by doing this prisoner swap, making it more likely that they are going to actually go and unlawfully detain more people so that they have bargaining chips so that we will in the future release whoever we might arrest that is important to Putin?”

Thomas Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the message the prisoner swap sends to others “is something that any White House official or government official would ask.”

“You do the best you can to try to limit the possibility of creating incentives to seize other Americans instead,” he said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s modus operandi is to round up Americans on false charges to then get his “henchmen” who are imprisoned abroad back, Neumann said.

A key player for Russia in this historic swap is Vadim Krasikov, according to retired Marine Col. Stephen Ganyard, a former deputy assistant U.S. secretary of state. The convicted assassin had been serving a life sentence in Germany for a 2019 killing. In a February interview with former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, Putin signaled that Russia was willing to swap Krasikov for Gershkovich.

“The Russians held out until they could get access to this KGB assassin,” Ganyard said. “Putin will bring his KGB agents home.”

Russia can be expected to continue to detain Americans to achieve that goal, he said.

“It’s pretty standard procedure for the Russians to have a number of us folks held under charges that are clearly manufactured as a way to make sure that they always have some sort of negotiating leverage or reasoning for the U.S. to want to talk to them,” Ganyard said.

Graham said at this time it does not appear there are a lot of Russians in American prisons who the Kremlin wants back.

“I think the deal has minimal implications for anything that the Russians might do as far as seizing Americans is concerned at this point,” he said.

For Neumann, prisoner swap negotiations are steeped in this dilemma when countries are dealing with hostile nations, though are often the only way to bring unlawfully detained citizens home.

“I think that is always a struggle when you are doing these negotiations, of recognizing that you are creating an incentive structure,” she said. “I don’t know that I’ve heard a plausible argument that the alternative is, ‘No we’re not going to negotiate at all, we’re just going to let these people die in a Russian prison.'”

“That’s not how we take care of our citizens,” she continued.

Referencing former President Theodore Roosevelt’s quote on critics — that the “credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena” — she said it is easy to question prisoner swap negotiations from the sidelines.

“But until you actually get into the arena and do the fight, you don’t actually appreciate how difficult these decisions are,” she said. “It is a pretty stereotypical critique. It’s also one in which nobody has ever come up with a plausible alternative to meet our obligation to take care of our American citizens that are unlawfully detained.”

National security adviser Jake Sullivan addressed that obligation during a White House briefing Thursday.

“It is difficult to send back a convicted criminal to secure the release of an innocent American,” he said, calling it one of the “hard decisions” involved in these exchanges. “And yet sometimes the choice is between doing that or consigning that person basically to live out their days in prison in a hostile foreign country or in the hands of a hostile power.”

He said the U.S. assessed and analyzed that risk in this case and found that the benefit outweighs the risk. He also noted that Americans have been unjustly detained in times when the U.S. did engage in prisoner exchanges and during times when they did not.

In the face of that risk, the U.S. government has attempted to warn American citizens.

After the release of basketball star Brittney Griner in a prisoner swap in 2022, Biden “strongly” urged all Americans to take precautions when traveling abroad and to review the State Department’s travel advisories, including warnings about the risk of being wrongfully detained by a foreign government. Russia currently has a Level 4 Do Not Travel warning from the State Department, the highest level possible.

“He was very clear about that warning, because what’s going to happen next is over time, we’ll see the Russians take in people on trumped-up charges so that they have negotiation leverage, or at least discussion leverage with the U.S. at some point in the future,” Ganyard said.

When asked Thursday during remarks on the prisoner swap how to prevent such incentives in the future, Biden responded, “I’m advising people not to go certain places, tell them what’s at risk, what’s at stake.”

Graham said he does not think Russia picks up just anybody because they need someone to trade.

“It’s people who have violated their laws,” he said, pointing to Griner, who pleaded guilty to drug charges, as an example. “Americans need to recognize, particularly if traveling in Russia, that the laws there are different from those in the United States and are much more severe in prosecuting certain things.”