Ankara, Turkey. A major prisoner swap between Russia and Belarus on one side and the United States and Western countries on the other. It is coordinated by Turkish intelligence. A total of 26 prisoners are involved. Moscow has released Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich; Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva; veteran human rights activist and co-director of the NGO Memorial Oleg Orlov; and artist Aleksandra Skochilenko, imprisoned for denouncing the war in Ukraine by placing anti-invasion messages in place of price tags in a supermarket. Also released are American citizen Paul Whelan, sentenced to 16 years in prison on espionage charges he denied, calling them baseless by Washington; German citizen RK, sentenced to death in Belarus and later pardoned by dictator Lukashenko; and Russian opposition activists Vladimir Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin, Andrei Pivovarov, Lilia Chanysheva, and Ksenia Fadeeva. And also Kevin Lik, Demuri Voronin, Vadim Ostanin, Patrick Schobel, and Herman Moyzhes. Some of them hold German citizenship. Eight Russian citizens may have been released, according to The Insider. Since the Cold War, there has never been such a number of individuals exchanged in this way, and there has never been, to our knowledge, an exchange involving so many countries, so many close partners and allies of the United States working together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ankara, Turkey. A major prisoner swap between Russia and Belarus on one side and the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-664780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-s-en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n