How the US fell into the hostage trap

Around midday in late summer 2019, a Russian national named Vadim Krasikov shot a Chechen former platoon commander once in the shoulder and twice in the head in a public park in Berlin. Krasikov, it turned out, was no ordinary killer. A colonel in the Russian security services and former bodyguard of Vladimir Putin, he had entered Germany under a false identity and executed the hit on behalf of the Russian state. Caught later the same day, Krasikov was ultimately convicted of murder by a German court and sentenced to life in prison in 2021.

Krasikov was strangely complacent about his fate. He “said nothing in his two years in Germany that could reveal his importance to the Kremlin.” He didn’t even react to his sentence of life imprisonment, with no possibility of parole. He just told a prison guard, “the Russian Federation will not leave me to rot in jail.”

Krasikov was right. Putin wanted to bring him home. The question was how. What leverage did Putin have and, if none, what leverage would he have to create?

The story that unfolded would reveal a new aspect of Russia’s “shadow war” against the West: hostage-taking. That is the subject of the new book, Swap, by Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw of the Wall Street Journal. In 230 pages of deep reporting, the authors expose the murky world of hostage diplomacy, a new reality in which authoritarian states like Russia arrest innocent people to gain leverage over their adversaries. As they note in the prologue, hostage-taking has “somehow become a central tool of modern statecraft, a mechanism for nuclear powers to inflict pain on one another without tipping into war.”

Unlike non-state actors, such as terrorist groups or criminal gangs, which break the law generally in the hope of getting a ransom payment, authoritarian states enjoy the veneer of legitimacy that court proceedings, however shambolic, and a seat at the United Nations can provide. This state involvement compels the US and other states to employ diplomatic means to negotiate prisoner swaps in order to free its citizens from “abductor states” like Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and China.

This brings us back to the case of Krasikov.

In March 2023, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was working on a story about Russian tank production. As he was waiting to meet a source in a restaurant in Ekaterinburg, Russia’s third largest city, he was arrested by plainclothes agents. He would spend the next 15 months in a Stalin-era prison, the first American journalist to be arrested in Russia (or Soviet Union) in 37 years.

What followed was perhaps the most complex prisoner swap in recent history, involving seven countries and negotiations that dragged on for years. In the end, Krasikov returned to Russia together with nine others: a spy-couple who had spent over a decade building their cover in Argentina and Slovenia; a suspected military intelligence officer who had roamed Europe, cozying up to Russian dissidents while posing as a Spanish journalist; a businessman who had been indicted on fraud charges in the US; a hacker, who was serving a 27-year sentence, also in the US; a domestic intelligence operative, captured by Estonia and extradited to the United States over dealings involving sensitive military technology; and a military intelligence officer captured in Norway.

In exchange, Russia released sixteen hostages. Apart from Gershkovich, there were three Russian dissidents who had worked for the late Alexei Navalny; two opposition politicians; a human rights activist; a Red Cross employee; a high school student; an artist; and six other Russian, American, and German citizens who, while traveling or working in Russia, had the misfortune of catching the eye of Russia’s security Apparatus.

Thus it was that five years after he murdered the Chechen in a Berlin park, Krasikov found himself on a flight home, where Putin greeted him on the tarmac in Moscow. According to the authors, it took the arrest of a prominent journalist for Putin finally to have enough leverage to effect Krasikov’s release. But Putin may have been pushing on an open door.

Parkinson and Hinshaw explain that Biden was keen on exchanges even before he took up the Oval Office. Already as president-elect he told his incoming National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, that he viewed American hostages held overseas as a political “opportunity.” In a secure room at his house in Delaware, “the incoming commander-in-chief had gathered three of his closest advisers and was telling them he sensed there could be political room for his administration to bring as many US citizens home as possible by conducting prisoner trades.” Over the course of Biden’s term in office, the number of Americans abroad whom the state department considers to be “wrongfully detained” would grow to a record high.

Biden, however, was not alone. In the authors’ telling, the origins of the historic Krasikov exchange can be traced back to an event in 2010, the significance of which only became evident much later. At that time, the Obama administration seemed particularly blasé in its assessment of the Putin regime. When ten Russian spies were found to be living undercover in American suburbs, the White House played down their operations and deployment as a relic of the Cold War. “That assessment was at best so naive as to be negligent, and at worst a bold-faced lie,” Parkinson and Hinshaw write.

Obama returned Putin’s ten sleeper agents—Russia’s most elite operatives and Putin’s most treasured category of spy—in exchange for a handful of political prisoners and Russian intelligence officers who had spied for the West. As Parkinson and Hinshaw see it, the exchange “sent a signal that under the right circumstances, the US would bend its laws to suit the needs of the moment.” Obama had given up ten valuable assets in exchange for the freedom of only four people.

The prisoners Putin released may have been free, but they weren’t safe. He didn’t regard the prisoners he traded as beyond his jurisdiction simply because they now lived in the West. Eight years after the swap, in 2018, Putin’s agents tracked one of them—a Russian MI-6 asset named Sergei Skripal—to a Salisbury address in the UK and smeared a military-grade nerve agent called Novichok on his door handle.

The two assassins made it back to Russia before the British authorities could arrest them.

The poison attack nearly killed Skripal and his daughter and resulted in the death of an innocent British woman whose boyfriend had found the Novichok delivery mechanism—a perfume bottle—in a nearby dumpster. The message Putin sent could not have been clearer: anyone he regarded a traitor could be tracked down and eliminated, no matter how far in the past their infractions, no matter where they now lived. The Russian security services had no regard for law, jurisdiction, or collateral victims in the West.

Where does it all end? Hostage-taking has always existed, but never before has it been conducted by state actors so systematically and on such a scale. And the West is at a disadvantage. If it doesn’t play along, innocent people will be abandoned to serve often draconian sentences in foreign prisons. If it engages, this only proves to authoritarian governments that hostage-taking works.

Swap is a book about events so recent that we have yet to see their consequences fully unfold. The US has shown itself amenable to hostage diplomacy—so long as the hostage-taker has a seat at the UN. “In total, the Biden administration brought home seventy Americans declared ‘wrongfully detained’ in Iran, Venezuela, or China, reuniting families—but also, critics say, fueling a pattern that will continue for years,” Parkinson and Hinshaw write. “Prisoner-trading is just what countries do now, a cost of business that America’s political parties have both accepted.”

Swap: A Secret History of the New Cold War by Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson, Harper, 304 pages