Two years, secret talks, high stakes: How prisoner swap deal was struck

Senior White House officials provided a detailed timeline of events in a call with reporters, including from the BBC’s US partner CBS, on Thursday. They said the first hint that Moscow may have been open to a deal came in the autumn of 2022.

The US and Russia had been negotiating the release of Brittney Griner, the American basketball star who was arrested for possessing cannabis oil and sent to a Russian penal colony. Griner was eventually released later that year in a high-profile swap for the notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.

But during those conversations, the White House officials said, Russia made clear it also wanted to secure the release of the hitman Vadim Krasikov, who was serving a life sentence in Germany for shooting dead a man in a busy Berlin park on the direct orders of the Kremlin.

Mr Sullivan told his German counterpart that Russia was angling for Krasikov’s release, and asked whether Berlin would consider freeing him in exchange for Alexei Navalny, the vocal anti-Putin campaigner and opposition leader who was being held in Russia.

Germany, however, was reluctant to release a hitman who had committed such a brazen murder on its own soil.

While Mr Sullivan did not get a definitive answer from Berlin, the initial conversations in 2022, both between the US and Russia and the US and Germany, helped pave the way for the larger, more complex agreement struck in recent weeks that was completed on the sweltering runway of a Turkish airport.

That’s because both sides signalled, at least to some extent, what they wanted. Russia made clear it wanted Krasikov.

And Washington did not just want Navalny, it also wanted Paul Whelan, an ex-Marine who was jailed on espionage charges in Russia in 2018.

The early elements of a potential swap deal then began to take shape – but there was still a long, long way to go.

In late March 2023, a 31-year-old Wall Street Journal Reporter from New Jersey was arrested by Russian intelligence agents while on a reporting trip. His detention raised a chorus of condemnation from the US and its allies.

A day later, President Biden instructed Mr Sullivan to pull together a deal that would bring him, and Mr Whelan, home.

The US directly contacted Russia. Communication then began in earnest, White House officials said, and their respective foreign ministers spoke on the phone.

But the conversations soon moved from these top diplomats to the secretive intelligence services, which the US was hesitant to do as Mr Gershkovich was accused of spying and Washington feared involving the CIA would only fuel those claims.

As the wheels of these tense negotiations were turning in late 2023, the US came to understand that the release of the hitman Krasikov was key to any successful deal, according to senior White House officials. Offers were made to Russia that did not include the 58-year-old assassin. They were always rebuffed.