Russlands neue Politik der Entführung

Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw: “One night in August 2024, the two of us stood on a runway at Joint Base Andrews in the balmy Maryland moonlight, watching the sky for an unmarked CIA jet that would deliver three Americans who had been imprisoned by Russian President Vladimir Putin as bargaining chips. Among them was our *Wall Street Journal* colleague Evan Gershkovich, the first American reporter jailed on espionage charges since the Soviet era. After being assigned to dig into what had happened to our friend, we’d followed the secret talks to free him from Lefortovo, the Moscow prison where Stalin once executed class enemies. We’d met spies, oligarchs, makeshift middlemen, and even Hollywood and Silicon Valley celebrities working in the shadows to orchestrate what ultimately became the largest prisoner swap in U.S.-Russian history, freeing inmates jailed in seven countries.

“Our reporting gave us an unsettling view into how Russia and America actually relate to each other today, at a moment when a rules-based order is fragmenting. As we detail in our book *Swap: A Secret History of the New Cold War*, the United States has become enmeshed in a piratical new world, and in a major shift in U.S. foreign policy, both political parties now accept that prisoner-trading with the likes of Putin is a game that America must play. Norms of conduct that stabilized Moscow-Washington relations even at the height of the Cold War have now eroded. Putin is testing how much he can use prisoners and their desperate families as leverage against the United States and its allies. Recent deals have brought deserving Americans home—including our colleague—but also undermined Western governments’ ability to enforce their laws and policies against Russians who violate them. President Donald Trump is accepting the danger, as Joe Biden did, that each successive trade may further embolden Putin to snatch more Westerners to swap away.

“…Complex prisoner trades with moving parts all around the globe underscore America’s continuing power in international affairs. Yet with each trade, America’s legal power to extradite suspects weakens. Allied governments ask themselves why they should bother investigating and jailing a Russian citizen for genuine crimes just for America to exchange them into freedom. Still, the business of taking and trading persists unabated. Last month, about a year after the swap that brought home our colleague, a plane from Estonia landed on the U.S. East Coast, delivering an ethnic Russian jailed in that Baltic nation for smuggling electronics for the Kremlin’s war effort in Ukraine. If the past is any prelude, it won’t be long before he is sent home in style, as the passenger of honor on an unmarked jet, touching down on a moonlit runway.”

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