[CedarDave]

Largest prisoner swap since the end of the cold war.

[CedarDave]

Lots of TV coverage on Fox. Biden to speak from White House shortly.

[Sacajaweau]

Interesting that the Quantanamo case just concluded for 3 monsters.

[Angelino97]

Gershkovich has some Russian background and fluency. From his Wiki page:

Gershkovich's parents, Ella and Mikhail Gershkovich, are Jewish immigrants who each settled in the U.S. after leaving the Soviet Union via the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program during a period of mass emigration, ending up in the United States in 1979 and eventually New York City, where they met.

The couple moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where Gershkovich and his sister grew up speaking Russian at home. Sources differ on how fluent Gershkovich is in Russian, with Gershkovich himself saying he learned most of his Russian in Moscow, an account bolstered by his colleague, The New Yorker Moscow correspondent Joshua Yaffa.

[Bob434]

how long was the black basketball ‘female’ whatshername in prison there fore? it sure wasn’t for more than a year- the biden admin got right on that case- but this one? Meh= not so much apparently

[BobL]

I wonder if Evan will be again in such a hurry to collect information for US Intelligence, although I suspect he’s already been given his tickets to vacation in North Korea.

I also do have to wonder whether the Russians supplied him with ‘the other side’ regarding the Ukraine War, since the Western Media has zero interest in reporting it and prefers to leave the West thinking that it all started because Putin got up on the wrong side of the bed on Feb 24th, 2024.

[mac_truck]

Why aren’t they reporting who the Russians got in exchange?

Seems intentional...🤔

[CedarDave]

Four Russians imprisoned in the US – Alexander Vinnik, Maxim Marchenko, Vadim Konoshechenko, and Vladislav Klushin – also disappeared from the database operated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons, the RIA state news agency claimed.

[dartuser]

Putin exploiting Dem election optics ... Biden will waste no time taking credit for all this hard work. Putin likely made the offer to help the Dems.

[TornadoAlley3]

Biden just molested and embarrassed a 13 year old relative of an hostage and sang Happy Birthday to her.

[napscoordinator]

This is great news. The marine was released too!!!!! Thank God!

[knarf]

IMO

President Trump has/had friends and contacts that accomplish great things but only when he became President again, and I believe the commie bastards found out enough to approach and offer something for no other reason than to steal President Trump's thunder.

It is most obvious they are committing scorched earth policies and in the short time left before the election, they're gonn'a rack up as many points as they can to hide their anti American hearts.

[Michigander222]

Finally!!!! Paul Whelan lives in my city Novi Michigan! Welcome home!!!!

[John S Mosby]

What did Erdogan get from the Russians...hmmmm? As he bleats about intervening with Israel. A supposed NATO member the very mooooosleeem Turks (aka, Nazi collaborators) are at work again.

The Saudis and Emirates will not like this development to the benefit of the Iranians— still trying to take over the Caliphate. No shiiite(s).

[Brown Deer]

Journalists, including Evan Gershkovich, and political activists were released by Russia for spies and a convicted assassin.

Vadim Kraskikov, 58, is a convicted Russian assassin who had been serving a life sentence in Germany for the 2019 murder of a former Chechen fighter in a Berlin park.

Vladislav Klyushin, 42, is a Russian businessman with ties to the Kremlin. In September 2023, he was sentenced to nine years in a U.S. prison after being convicted of participating in a $93 million insider trading scheme that involved hacking corporate computer networks.

The son of a Russian legislator, Roman Seleznev was convicted in 2016 by a U.S. federal court in Washington State for orchestrating a cyberattack on thousands of American businesses. He infiltrated point-of-sale systems to steal and sell credit card information, leading to a loss of $169 million for financial institutions.

Vadim Konoshchenok, a Russian citizen with alleged connections to Russia’s Federal Security Service, was arrested in Estonia and extradited to the United States on July 13, 2023.

Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva — a Russian couple who posed as Argentine expats living an ordinary life in Slovenia — were sentenced to 19 months each in the Slovenian capital after they pleaded guilty to espionage.

Polish authorities arrested Spanish-Russian national Pablo González, a reporter covering the war in Ukraine for Spanish media, on the Ukrainian border on suspicion of conducting intelligence activities in 2022. He also goes by his Russian name Pavel Rubtsov, Voice of America reported.

In October 2022, Norwegian domestic security authorities arrested a man who entered the country claiming to be a Brazilian academic working on Arctic security issues, on suspicion of being a Russian spy. In Norway, he called himself José Assis Giammaria and worked at a local university in the Arctic city of Tromso. Norwegian investigators later identified him as Mikhail Valerievich Mikushin of Russia.

AMERICANS REMAINING IN RUSSIA

Marc Fogel, a teacher at the Anglo-American School of Moscow who spent 27 years teaching overseas, nearly didn’t return to Russia in 2021 after almost a decade at the school. But he and his wife, Jane, agreed to spend one more year in Moscow before retiring.

Robert Romanov Woodland, 32, who was born in Russia and adopted as a toddler by an American couple in 1993, was sentenced in July to 12½ years in prison on drug charges.

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Gordon Black seemed smitten with Russian woman Alexandra Vashchuk, with whom he started a romantic relationship while stationed in South Korea.

Former U.S. Marine Robert Gilman of Massachusetts had been serving 3½ years in Russia — reduced from 4½ — for kicking a police officer while drunk in the western Russian city of Voronezh.

Russia’s Federal Security Service announced the arrest of 33-year-old Ksenia Karelina — a ballerina-turned-esthetician at a Beverly Hills spa in Los Angeles — on treason charges in February, accusing her of collecting funds for a Ukrainian organization that was aiding the Ukrainian military.

Texas resident David Barnes was sentenced in February to 21 years in prison on charges that he abused his two sons in the United States. The allegations had been investigated in Texas, but authorities said they found no grounds for the charges.

Russian-born U.S. citizen Eugene Spector, an executive at a medical-device company, had already been serving a 3½-year prison sentence for bribery when he was handed an additional and more severe charge of espionage in 2023.

Michael Travis Leake — an American expatriate, former paratrooper and frontman of Moscow-based rock band Lovi Noch — was arrested in June 2023 on charges of selling drugs and sentenced a year later to 13 years in a maximum-security prison colony.

[Honorary Serb]

In an earlier swap, Paul Whelan was left in prison, but “gay” women’s basketballer Brittney Griner was released!

https://www.newsnationnow.com/prime/paul-whelan-idisintegrating-in-russian-prison-brother/

[johniegrad]

I’m happy to hear of the return of these Americans kidnapped by Russia. And I’m indifferent to any political implications concerning it.

One thing I’ve noticed, though. It seems that whenever a journalist is taken captive, released, or killed doing their job, the media’s coverage is disproportional to what it would be for another person.

I get it. It’s one of their own. But the released Marine was held much longer than the journalist.

Well, it’s a happy day nonetheless. I probably should have just remained silent on this.