TALLINN – After years of isolation behind the bars and high walls of U.S. penitentiaries and Russian penal colonies, the prisoners will find themselves suddenly free, an emotional moment culminating from long, back-channel negotiations between Washington and Moscow.
Sometimes, they see those who are part of the swap as they pass each other on an airport tarmac or, as in the Cold War, the Glienicke Bridge connecting West Berlin to Potsdam. In decades of prisoner exchanges, those released have included spies, journalists, drug and arms dealers, and even a well-known athlete.
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Thursday's historic exchange was an especially complex affair involving months of talks among several countries before planes flew the large number of prisoners to freedom.
Some notable previous swaps:
Brittney Griner and Viktor Bout
The Dec. 9, 2022, exchange of the WNBA star for a Russian arms trader nicknamed the “merchant of death” was notable and controversial for the magnitude of its disparities.
Griner had been arrested 10 months earlier on arrival at a Moscow airport when vape canisters containing cannabis oil were found in her luggage. She was convicted of drug charges and sentenced to nine years in prison, a harsh sentence even in low-tolerance Russia.
Bout was arrested in 2008 in a U.S. sting operation in Thailand for offering to sell surface-to-air missiles to men masquerading as Colombian rebels. He eventually was extradited to the United States and convicted of charges, including conspiring to kill U.S. nationals, and sentenced to 25 years.
Griner's celebrity status made her case highly visible, and the Biden administration worked intensively to win her release, which came at the airport in Abu Dhabi. Critics said Washington had caved in to political pressure by swapping an arms dealer for a famous athlete.
Trevor Reed and Konstantin Yaroshenko
The exchange of Reed and Yaroshenko was notable because it came amid soaring tensions only two months after Russia started its full-scale war in Ukraine.
Reed, an ex-Marine, was arrested in 2019 in Moscow for assaulting a police while allegedly drunk. Reed denied the allegations and then-U.S. Ambassador John Sullivan said the case was so preposterous that “even the judge laughed," but Reed got a sentence of nine years.
Yaroshenko, a pilot, was arrested in 2010 in Liberia for involvement in a lucrative cocaine distribution scheme. He was extradited to the U.S. and sentenced to 20 years.
The April 7, 2022, exchange took place at an airport in Turkey.
The sleepers
In June 2010, U.S. officials rounded up 10 Russians alleged to be “sleeper agents” — living under false identities without specific espionage missions — to be activated as needed. Most of the intelligence they gathered apparently was of low significance.
One exception was Anna Chapman, who captured attention in the tabloids with her long red hair and model-like features.
They Russians were exchanged the next month at the Vienna airport in an unusual swap for four Russians imprisoned in their homeland, including Sergei Skripal, a double agent working with the British intelligence service. Skripal took up residence in the U.K., where he and his daughter suffered near-fatal nerve agent poisoning eight years later that officials blamed on Russia.
Rudolf Abel and Francis Gary Powers
In probably the most dramatic swap of the Cold War era, Abel and Powers were exchanged on Feb. 10, 1962, on the Glienicke Bridge connecting the U.S.-occupied zone of Berlin with East Germany.
Abel was the alias of British-born William Fisher, who moved to the Soviet Union and joined its intelligence operations in the 1920s. Posted to the U.S. in 1948, he was arrested on espionage charges in 1957 and sentenced to 30 years.
Powers piloted a U-2 high-altitude photo reconnaissance plane that was shot down over central Russia in 1960. Because of the highly sensitive nature of the flight, which was to photograph military facilities, Powers' gear included a coin coated with neurotoxin to be used to kill himself if discovered, but he did not use it.
The exchange on the “Bridge of Spies,” as it was known, was depicted in the 2015 film of the same name.