7 countries, secret meetings and a mom. Behind the deal that freed Gershkovich and Whelan

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WASHINGTON – An hour before he ended his reelection campaign, President Joe Biden was working the phones to try to secure the release of Americans who the U.S. says were wrongly held prisoner in Russia.

It was Sunday afternoon, July 21. Biden, recovering from COVID-19 at his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, had been under siege for weeks from Democrats who wanted him to drop out of the presidential race.

His own future now in doubt, Biden concentrated on the fate of the prisoners in Russia. His administration had been working for months and in some cases years, to bring them home. With an agreement finally within reach, Biden phoned one of his counterparts, Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golog, to work out the final pieces of a deal that would set the prisoners free.

An hour later, Biden informed the world he was abandoning his campaign for a second term. Eleven days after that, the now lame-duck president stood in the White House State Dining Room, with some of the prisoners’ families by his side, and announced that their loved ones had been freed from Russian custody and were on their way home.

“Their brutal ordeal is over,” Biden said, “and they are free.”

The deal that freed the Americans and others held in Russia – announced Thursday and finalized during a period of political and personal turmoil for Biden – is the largest prisoner exchange between Washington, Moscow and four other governments since the Cold War.

Analysts credited the Biden administration and U.S. allies with pulling off a historic agreement that involved months of delicate negotiations with Russia amid the ongoing fury over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine. Biden called the deal “a feat of diplomacy.”

“I’ve done a lot of these operations, and I can tell you this stuff is extremely delicate, very, very hard and takes a lot of care and thought and talking to people who may not have our interests in mind,” said Bryan Stern, who has successfully negotiated the rescue of numerous hostages but was not involved in the prisoner swap discussions.

Freed as the result of the deal were Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who Russia convicted of espionage charges in July, and former Marine Paul Whelan, who had been imprisoned in Russia on espionage charges since December 2018. The U.S. says the charges against both men were baseless.

All told, 24 prisoners were released under the agreement. They include 16 people previously detained in Russia in exchange for eight individuals held in the U.S., Germany, Norway, Slovenia and Poland.

For the families of the Americans detained, the nightmare was finally coming to an end.

'Their brutal ordeal is over': Biden hails largest prisoner swap since Cold War

Biden on prisoner swap: 'Get it done'

Since taking office, the Biden administration had been working to free Whelan, who had been detained in Russia while Donald Trump was president. The arrests of Gershkovich in March 2023 and Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva the following October complicated the negotiations.

Putin, it seemed, had made an art of kidnapping innocent civilians and then attempting to use them as bargaining chips to persuade other governments to return violent criminals to his regime.

Russia would not agree to release any of the three Americans without an exchange that included Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin who had been jailed in Germany since 2021, said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Because he was in German custody, Krasikov was not someone the U.S. could offer to free as part of a prisoner swap.

Biden reached out directly to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. But Germany was initially reluctant to help. Krasikov was serving a life sentence in Germany for killing a Georgian citizen who had fought Russian troops in Chechnya and later claimed asylum in Germany. Zelimkhan Khangoshvili was gunned down by Krasikov in Kleiner Tiergarten, a central Berlin park, in 2019. 

Witnesses said Krasikov killed Khangoshvili by using a handgun with a silencer fitted onto it, which he then threw into the nearby Spree River, along with a bike and a dark wig he'd been wearing to disguise his identity.

"Germany was hit hard in the center of its capital when that thug ruthlessly killed a human being. No country can accept this and let this easily go," said one German official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the topic.

The German official said there was reluctance to free Krasikov as part of the prisoner swap with Russia. Doing so, Germany feared, would send a message that it cannot always protect its citizens or refugees who reside within its borders.

The shooting had represented a "humiliation" for Germany's security services, the German official said.

Meanwhile, another influential party, Gershkovich's mother, Ella Milman, was working behind the scenes to get the negotiations moving.

Milman, who was raised in Leningrad around the same time as Putin but who now lived in Philadelphia, continuously contacted Biden administration officials about her son's case, according to an account published by the Wall Street Journal.

She worked backchannels and official channels on her son's behalf. She traveled to Moscow for his appeal hearing. She walked up to Scholz at a gala dinner in New York and pressed him to help free Gershkovich. She approached Biden in a photo line at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner in Washington and urged him to call the German leader to speed things along.

A visit by Scholz to the White House on Feb. 9 helped move negotiations forward. During their meeting, Biden again implored Scholz to help. Scholz relented.

“For you, I will do this,” Scholz told Biden, the senior U.S. administration official recalled.

Biden then turned to National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and said: “Get it done.”

Negotiators had originally hoped a deal would include the release of Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader and outspoken Putin critic. Navalny, arrested in what was widely viewed as an act of retribution by Putin and the Kremlin, died in February while serving a 19-year prison sentence.

On the day the U.S. learned of Navalny’s death, Sullivan held a previously scheduled meeting with Gershkovich's parents. The White House team working to free the prisoners worried that Navalny’s death was a blow to their efforts to free Gershkovich and Whelan. Sullivan, though, thought a deal was still possible. It would be a rocky path and would take longer – but it was still possible, the administration official said.

Sullivan instructed his team to come up with additional options to make a deal politically viable, particularly for the Germans.

A few months later, roughly in April, Biden sent Scholz an outline of the proposal, drafted by Sullivan, that reflected more than a year of work. The deal would include the release of the Russian assassin Krasikov.

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More: Beyond Paul Whelan, who else was released in the US-Russia prisoner swap

The deal is done

There were clues that a final deal was close.

Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., who represents the district in which Whelan lived and has advocated for his release, said she heard earlier this week that his whereabouts were unknown.

“Is he getting punished? Are the Russians playing games? What's going on?” she recalled. “And then we started to hear some rumblings.”

Stevens, who co-chairs the Congressional Task Force on American Hostages, was at the White House on Thursday morning for an unrelated meeting when she heard of the impending exchange before it was made public, she said.

Stevens said her office is working to ensure Whelan can find a new home in Michigan and rebuild his life. She called for continued efforts to deter such wrongful detentions.

“The pressure only remains. Foreign actors are going to continue to use Americans as pawns and target Americans to take them prisoner wrongfully,” she said, adding: “And we have to continue to push for the release of those remaining.”

The prisoner exchange came nearly a decade after the U.S. undertook a hostage policy overhaul that created a hostage envoy and recovery team. In 2022, Biden declared hostage-taking and wrongful detention a national emergency, adding new tools such as financial sanctions and visa bans.

In recent years, families have more publicly pressed the U.S. government to find ways to return their loved ones.

A report earlier this year from the Foley Foundation, which advocates for the freedom of Americans held captive abroad, found there were more than 40 American nationals known to be held captive unjustly in 16 countries. The foundation was created by Diane Foley less than a month after her son, James Foley, an American freelance journalist, was beheaded by ISIS in Syria in 2014.

The foundation's report noted that the number of U.S. nationals in detention, after peaking in 2022, has fallen amid efforts to secure their freedom.

The key complication in the latest prisoner swap – Russia’s demand to release a prisoner held by Germany, not the United States – required “painstaking conversations, not just between adversaries, but also between allies,” said Danielle Gilbert, a professor at Northwestern University who researches hostage policy.

Gilbert is part of a commission at the Center for Strategic and International Studies working to develop strategies to disincentivize the practice without closing the door to exchanges, such as by enlisting pressure from third-party countries. But it’s a challenge, she said, in part, because such governments are often already under U.S. economic sanctions.

“It's heartening news to know that even in the midst of war and tensions that these backchannels do exist and the negotiations are possible,” she said. “But it also leaves open the question of how do governments like the United States try to curb this practice going forward and ensure that they don't have to make these deals so often?”

While successful exchanges often come with worries they will “embolden some bad actors to imprison another journalist or traveler,” the difficult calculus should favor detained Americans, said Cameron Hume, a former U.S. ambassador and consultant with the Richardson Center, which has advocated on behalf of Whelan’s family for his return but was not involved in Thursday’s prisoner swap.

“I think our society has a duty to bring folks home that, on balance, outweighs the merit of another year in prison for an assassin,” Hume said.

More: Brittney Griner on Paul Whelan, Evan Gershkovich being released: 'It's a great day'

'Everybody stepped up'

At the White House on Thursday, with the prisoners' family members by his side, Biden thanked U.S. allies for their role in making the prisoner swap happen. He specifically cited German chancellor Scholz.

Russia's demands that the assassin Krasikov be released as part of a deal required "some significant concessions from Germany, which they originally concluded they could not do because of the person in question," Biden said.

The final agreement "is a powerful example of why it’s vital to have friends in this world – friends you can trust, work with, and depend upon, especially on matters of great consequence and sensitivity like this," Biden said.

Near the end of his remarks, Biden brought to the lectern Miriam Butorin, the young daughter of Kurmasheva, the Russian American journalist who was among those prisoners freed.

Miriam turns 13 on Friday. And Biden had a surprise for the young girl.

He hugged her and then asked the room to sing "Happy Birthday." Biden led the singalong in a grandfatherly voice that was at times slightly off-key.

“Remember, no serious guys till you're 30,” he teased.

Turning serious, Biden said Miriam will now get to celebrate her birthday with her mom − like they should have been able to do all along.

Contributing: Tom Vanden Brook, Francesca Chambers and Joey Garrison