The last time Russia had arrested an American journalist was in 1986, when it accused the U.S. News & World Report correspondent Nicholas Daniloff of espionage. It was an obvious response to the U.S. arrest of a Russian employee of the United Nations a few days earlier, and it took only a few more weeks for the two of them to be exchanged, with two Soviet dissidents thrown in.
For Secret Project Silver Lake, Gershkovich’s arrest presented an opportunity of sorts — for the White House to approach Germany again. Grozev kept telling any official who would listen that Germany would be more receptive if Navalny, a hero in that country, were also part of the package. Grozev had another card to play: His own investigative work had played a crucial role in identifying Krasikov as the man who conducted that assassination in the Berlin park. Grozev’s own testimony had helped put him behind bars. If Grozev signaled that he was in favor of the swap — despite the possibility that Krasikov, once released, might retaliate — the Germans might be more willing to consider it.
Rubin summed up the German dilemma as “moral imperative versus moral hazard.” The moral imperative was to save hostages. The moral hazard was the danger of establishing precedent by releasing an assassin, one who had acted brazenly on German soil. Even inside the German cabinet, there was no agreement.
Then there was the question of how to conduct the negotiations. Standard diplomatic channels are too inflexible for such a complicated deal. The Russian government is a black box. Everyone knows that President Vladimir Putin personally makes all important decisions, but no one knows who has enough access to him to pose the questions. So Grozev tried to find his own ways in, through Russian intelligence contacts he had developed while attempting to find his would-be assassins.
In the summer of 2023, Grozev reached out to a spy — someone who he says was trained from childhood for a career in espionage. Grozev suspected the man of being one of his potential assassins but also of being able to help negotiate a swap.
Pevchikh wouldn’t hear of Grozev meeting with the spy directly. So they dispatched Ms. Rae, the producer of “Navalny,” an American former actress who has never met an adventure that scares her.
I was having lunch with Grozev when Rae was off in a European country meeting with the spy. Grozev was fretting because he hadn’t heard from her in hours. Then she called. She’d been dining with the spy. He was charming, she said, and didn’t seem like an assassin at all. “She has been Stockholm-ed,” Grozev said, referring to the fictional syndrome that supposedly makes hostages love their captors. The spy promised to take the proposed prisoner-exchange proposal to Putin. It’s not clear if he did.
At the same time, Gershkovich’s mother, Ella Milman, was mounting a campaign of her own. As her son’s colleagues at The Wall Street Journal have written , she was shuttling all over the world, finding ways to meet with top U.S. and German officials, with the goal of convincing them to broker her son’s release.
By February 2024, the White House was finally, fully behind the idea of negotiating a deal. A pre-existing channel — already used to execute the Reed and Griner transfers — “on the intelligence side of the house,” in Washington-speak, was activated. It appeared that the Kremlin had agreed to a trade that would involve Gershkovich, Navalny and several other Russian dissidents. Grozev and Pevchikh, in Munich for an annual security conference, were ecstatic. On the evening of Feb. 15, they debated whether to buy champagne or hold off until the trade had happened. Out of superstition, they decided to hold off.
Late that night, Pevchikh suddenly blurted out a terrifying question: “But what if they kill him?”
That’s silly, Grozev told her. There is a protocol, a way these things are done.
Pevchikh later told me that she had no idea why she even asked what she asked: It wasn’t a fear she was aware of experiencing. The next day, the world learned that Navalny had died in a Russian prison.
Millions of Russians lost their hope for the future. Grozev and Pevchikh lost their friend.
Maria Pevchikh speaking on behalf of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny at the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2021.Credit...Cristobal Herrera Ulashkevich/EPA, via Shutterstock
A week earlier, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin had made his first reference to a possible swap, suggesting that Gershkovich could be traded for “a person who, out of patriotic sentiments, liquidated a bandit in one of the European capitals” — meaning Krasikov. Now, Grozev and Pevchikh wondered: By making Navalny’s release a condition of the swap, had they hastened his death? And did this mean that naming any other Russian dissidents would hasten their death, too? But Navalny was in a class by himself. No one else scared Putin as much. And anyway, by now the process was out of Grozev’s and Pevchikh’s hands. The government negotiators had taken over.
In October 2023, Russia took hostage another American journalist, Alsu Kurmasheva, who worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague. Kurmasheva, who is also a Russian national, had been visiting her ailing mother. The journalist was sentenced to six and a half years for spreading false information about the Russian armed forces.
Russia was also taking German hostages, including Kevin Lik, an 18-year-old high-school student who also holds Russian citizenship and was sentenced to four years in prison for high treason. Late last year, Belarus, Russia’s closest ally, arrested Rico Krieger, a former employee of the German Red Cross, and sentenced him to death for what the government called terrorism. In the face of a death sentence, the moral-hazard argument could no longer hold up.
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On Thursday, a Russian plane carrying 16 people, among them Americans, Germans and Russians, landed in Ankara, Turkey. In exchange, Russia got Krasikov, along with a Russian hacker and a Russian businessman convicted of insider trading, both of whom had been serving time in the United States, and five convicted or suspected spies, released by the United States, Norway, Poland and Slovenia. Grozev’s investigative work had played a key role in identifying several of the spies.
The three Americans posed for a photo with an American flag. They looked as one would expect: happy and emaciated. A neat stack of sandwiches was waiting on what appeared to be a conference table behind them. Then they and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a journalist and political activist who had survived two assassination attempts before being sentenced to 25 years for high treason, flew to the United States.
The freed dissidents are Ilya Yashin, an opposition politician sentenced to eight and a half years for “spreading false information about the Russian armed forces”; Oleg Orlov, a 71-year-old human-rights activist sentenced to two and a half years for “discrediting the Russian armed forces”; Aleksandra Skochilenko, an artist sentenced to seven years for “spreading false information”; Andrei Pivovarov, an activist sentenced to four years for being a member of what Russia calls an “undesirable organization”; and three former heads of regional chapters of Navalny’s organization, all of them sentenced for “extremist activities” — Ksenia Fadeyeva and Vadim Ostanin, who were serving nine years each, and Lilia Chanysheva, who had been sentenced to nine and a half years.
These charges, like the espionage charges against Gershkovich, are often described as “trumped up.” This is wrong: It implies that the former inmates didn’t commit the acts of which they were accused.