It was the largest, most elaborate prisoner exchange between Moscow and the West since the Cold War.
On Thursday, 24 prisoners were gathered to be exchanged at Esenboga airport in the Turkish capital of Ankara before boarding jets to fly them home.
Russian President Vladimir Putin greeted eight of his compatriots, who had been held in Europe and the United States on charges from cyber-fraud to espionage and murder, when they touched down in Moscow’s Vnukovo airport.
“I want to congratulate everyone on their return to their homeland,” he said. “I want to thank you for your loyalty to the oath, your duty and your homeland, which has never forgotten you for a minute.”
Russia received several spies including Anna and Artem Dultsev, a couple posing as Argentinian arts dealers arrested in Slovenia, who returned with their two children. Cybercrime kingpin Roman Seleznev and businessman Vladislav Klyushin, convicted of insider trading in the United States, also returned.
But the real prize was Vadim Krasikov, who shot dead Chechen rebel leader Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in a Berlin park in 2019. An elite veteran of the security forces, Krasikov was himself once wanted by Russian authorities for a string of contract killings, but never prosecuted.
In exchange, 16 inmates were sprung from Russian jails.
They included the Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich, recently sentenced to 16 years for spying; artist Sasha Skochilenko, handed seven years for swapping price tags in a supermarket with antiwar messages; former US Marine Paul Whelan, held for spying, and Ilya Yashin, sentenced to eight and a half years in December 2022 for spreading “fake news” over massacres in Ukraine allegedly committed by Russian troops.
