Tumbling into a new Cold War WSJ reporter Drew Hinshaw’s new book offers the inside scoop on Putin’s historic prisoner swap with the West
In August 2024, Western countries carried out the biggest prisoner swap with Russia in the country’s modern history. In exchange for a ragtag group of hackers and spies, and one high-profile FSB assassin, Vladimir Putin released 16 people from prison. Among those who went free were Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, RFE/RL journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, former U.S. Marine Paula Whelan, Russian opposition politicians Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, and veteran human rights activist Oleg Orlov. Leading up to the exchange, the details were kept strictly under wraps. But Wall Street Journal reporters Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson had the inside scoop all along. Their new book, Swap: A Secret History of the New Cold War, came out in August 2025. In an interview with Meduza, WSJ senior reporter Drew Hinshaw recounts how the world entered a new age of “hostage diplomacy.”
The following Q&A has been edited and abridged for length and clarity.
— How long did it take you to write this book? Were you able to find any sources in Russia who were willing to talk to you?
— We didn’t take a ton of time to write this book. Even before the August 2024 exchange, we could see that our colleague Evan Gershkovich had gotten wrapped up in a global game of what we call “hostage diplomacy,” which my colleague Joe Parkinson and I had written about before. It was a bizarre and surreal experience to have to cover your own newspaper, in a way. One of the strangest parts was knowing that these deals were coming together, but being unable to say anything because you didn’t want to jeopardize them.
After the exchange happened, we felt there was a whole history that even people who were deeply involved in it didn’t know. There was a game that had been played between the FSB, the U.S., and other European allies for years. And so we wanted to put together a definitive history of this very strange but very specific [aspect] of U.S.–Russian [relations], and it became this keyhole for seeing the breakdown of the post-Cold War order.
Almost all of our sources [spoke on condition of] anonymity during the period of negotiations. We did have sources in Russia, but it’s very complicated, as you can imagine. I hope what we’ve done here is show readers how the U.S.–Russia relationship really looks inside the room. On some level, the prisoner exchange last August was very small. Twenty-four prisoners and two children is not a very large number of people in the grand scheme of things. And yet, the haggling over those 24 people took up thousands and thousands of hours and really became a preoccupation for the top officials in both governments. And for us, it became a way to show how the U.S. and Russia really relate to each other as they tumble into this new Cold War.
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— What new information does your book provide, apart from what we already know from media coverage of this exchange?
— We talk a lot about the very specific negotiations between [Russian Security Council Secretary] Nikolai Patrushev and [U.S. National Security Advisor] Jake Sullivan, for example, or between the FSB and the CIA at the director and deputy director level. We’re inside the room for those conversations. We talk a lot about the Russian individuals who were arrested and held without trial [in the West] for two years: their backstories, how they were tracked, and how they were caught.
But it’s just as much a story about this bizarre cast of backchannel mediators — Hollywood producers, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The number of people who you wouldn’t have expected to be involved in the negotiations is just incredible.
The August prisoner exchange was historic, both because it was the largest prisoner exchange ever between the U.S. and Russia and because it announced to anyone who hadn’t noticed that we are in a radical new world order where governments just take and trade each other’s citizens. And frankly, the U.S. has had no choice but to play that game using its allies.
Looking back at the Cold War, the exchanges that took place on the bridges of East Berlin were generally small, one-for-one trades involving spies. Alsu Kurmasheva of Radio Free Europe is not a spy, she’s a veteran journalist, and yet she was exchanged — along with Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan, and Vladimir Kara-Murza — for people who are on the record saying, “Yes, we’re spies.” That is historic in all the worst ways because it announces a new state of affairs where ordinary travelers are a currency in a new global economy of prisoner trading.
— What role did Google CEO Eric Schmidt play in the exchange?
— To talk about Eric Schmidt I have to talk about something else.
The person who made this exchange happen, Alexey Navalny, died before it could be pulled off. For years, the U.S. and Russia were stuck. The Russians wanted [FSB agent] Vadim Krasikov, who was a convicted murderer held in Berlin. The U.S. didn’t really want to push an ally too hard to release a killer who shot down an exile near a playground, in broad daylight, about a kilometer from the German chancellor’s office. It crossed this horrible moral threshold. But the person who had the global charisma and the name to morally justify the act of releasing Krasikov was Alexey Navalny.
There were a whole host of people who recognized that you couldn’t invest all hope for a thriving, democratic Russia in one person. But still, the story of this heroic individual who literally was afraid of nothing, who had been poisoned and went back to his country, moved a lot of people in the U.S. — and one of those people was Eric Schmidt.
Navalny’s team was able to reach Eric and say, “Hey can you explain to the White House that there’s a deal they could make that would free Navalny? Yes, they’d have to release Krasikov, but we know the German government is willing to do that for Navalny.” (I should also add that on a personal level, [German Chancellor] Olaf Sholz was very, very moved by Navalny. He met him once after his poisoning and found him to be a “courageous man,” in his words.)
So, Eric Schmidt spoke with [U.S. President Joe] Biden and basically said, “Look, there’s a deal to be done here. Please, let’s make this happen. Let’s free Navalny.” And I think that was one of these important moments. Because to make this happen, the West had to embrace a game [based on mutual concessions] that’s actually very transactional and natural for the FSB officers on the other side.
— In the book, you write that Western governments were playing a game of “snatch-and-trade,” in which they arrested Russian intelligence officers to make this exchange happen. Can you talk about the Western side of this process?
— What the book illustrates is the unusual power that these families whose loved ones were jailed in Russia had. For years, they had been telling [U.S.] officials, “You guys need to round up spies to trade.” Paul Whelan’s sister [Elizabeth] went to the White House and gave a PowerPoint presentation where she said, “Here are your allies in Europe. You need to have them arrest some spies. Get it together.” Other people were saying the same thing over and over again, including the family of Trevor Reed, a marine who was arrested in Russia.
And sure enough, at the beginning of February 2022, a week or so after [American basketball star] Brittney Griner was arrested [in Russia], the CIA started reaching out to allies in Europe. MI6 did a lot of this, as well. In some cases, they were very direct and basically said, “Hey, do you know that this guy, Pablo Gonzalez, is in Poland? Can you arrest him?” That’s the way the game was played.
The families whose loved ones were jailed in Russia felt completely helpless and powerless at that time. But over many years, they were actually able to steer American foreign policy and get our intelligence agencies to stack up the chips that we needed to trade.
[At the same time,] the Western allies had laws they had to work under. It was a legal tight-rope walk in Slovenia, where they weren’t sure how long they could hold on to the two Russian “illegals.” In Norway, the home of the Nobel Peace Prize, they held [suspected Russian spy] Mikhail Mikushin for nearly two years without a trial. To me, that is not something Norway would have done in 1999, when history was “over” and everybody was living happily ever after. Poland held Pablo Gonzalez for two years without a trial, and a lot of that time he was in a cell by himself.
To me, this is an area where the world is changing, and this is just what’s done now. I can’t say I’m happy about it. In an ideal world, even a Russian intelligence officer would be entitled to a swift and immediate but fair trial. But we’re now in a world where if you want to make a prisoner trade, sometimes you have to hold someone for years while the other side works it out.
— How did the death of Alexey Navalny influence the exchange?
— Our reporting team [at the Wall Street Journal] — Bojan Pancevski, Aruna Viswanatha, Joe Parkinson, and I — were among the people who knew this deal was coming together. We were writing these incredible “hold-for-release” stories about Navalny and Evan walking free, and preparing ourselves mentally for our colleague to get out of jail — and we had to keep it a secret from people we know and work with every day. Still, like a lot of people, I doubted that Vladimir Putin was going to sign a piece of paper saying that Navalny could go free to Germany to do whatever he wants from the freedom of the West. That didn’t really comport with the Putin I thought I knew.
Then, [in February 2024] reporters are piling into Munich [for the annual Security Conference]; [U.S. Vice President] Kamala Harris is going to meet the Slovenian government to organize their part of the trade; [FBI Director] Christopher Wray is in Munich meeting with other intelligence heads; and all of a sudden, we find out that Navalny is dead. It was a total gut punch.
At the time, we were debating whether Evan was going to spend his 30s in prison and wondering how we were going to keep covering this hostage diplomacy for another 10 years. You have to give credit to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. He could see that Germany had committed to the principle of releasing Krasikov. And maybe they originally did that in return for Navalny, but now they’d gotten themselves past the psychological barrier. So the question then was, if we can’t free Navalny, who else can we save? Unfortunately, Russia has no shortage of deserving political prisoners who deserve a quick release.
— You also write in the book that Russia arrested Evan Gershkovich in order to trade him for Vadim Krasikov. How did you confirm this? And why was Krasikov so important for Russia?
— I have no doubt that was the reason for Evan’s arrest. Without going too deep into sourcing, the Russians had been saying “We want Krasikov” in every forum for months. You could see how the FSB is the first among equals within the Russian security apparatus. The SVR [Foreign Intelligence Service] was constantly calling the CIA and other allies, saying, “Hey, you’ve got two of our people in Slovenia, give them back, and maybe we can give you Paul Whelan.” And then they’d call back and say, “Actually, sorry, we had to talk to the FSB, and they want Krasikov.” The FSB basically wanted their own guy back and they held things up for quite a long time to get that done.
In a way, it’s a horrifying thing. Even during the Cold War I don’t think we freed people convicted of that level of offense. Krasikov was behind a number of murders of businesspeople and exiles, and there was CIA analysis suggesting he had been Putin’s on his bodyguard detail at one point. We talked to a lot of people to try and answer the question of the extent to which this was about Putin’s own sentimentality towards Krasikov or whether it was a mafioso-type thing. And everybody basically steered the needle towards the second analysis: that this was a matter of showing that if you go out there in the world to serve [the Russian] state and you get in trouble, it will get you back.
That’s part of what makes it so horrifying that he was freed. It’s a green light to the next generation of Krasikovs, and it’s really scary for dissidents, exiles, and all kinds of people who have understandably left Russia.
— Krasikov was convicted of killing a Chechen exile in Berlin. However, the list of prisoners released from Russia didn’t include anyone from Chechnya. Was the option of freeing some Chechen political prisoners ever discussed?
— No, not that I’m aware of. The U.S. and Germany put together the list of who came out of Russia, and I don’t know if that ever crossed their minds. I think they thought of Navanly and got people who he would have wanted out.
— How was the list of people released from Russia put together? Why were Russian opposition politicians like Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin included specifically?
— This is the crazy and, in a way, sickening thing, right? I would like to live in a world where all political prisoners are equal, whether you’re an ordinary person in Chechnya or a Pulitzer Prize-winning contributor to The Washington Post. I would like to believe in a world where both are [seen as] fathers, husbands, and siblings. But we live in a world where things like celebrity matter, and they didn’t want the headlines about this exchange to be “Weak Joe Biden frees murderer Vadim Krasikov” or “Weak Olaf Sholz caves to Putin and frees a killer.”
So, they had to get people out who were going to create bigger headlines. First and foremost, Evan Gershkovich, but also Vladimir Kara-Murza, who had just won a Pulitzer from a jail cell, which is a great story. He had so many friends in Washington: he was a pallbearer at John McCain’s funeral, and he had helped Jake Sullivan get the Magnitsky Act through Congress during the first Obama term. He was incredibly well connected, and his wife [Evgenia Kara-Murza] deserves credit, as well. When she would meet with people, she would always bring up other political prisoners in Russia — like Ilya Yashin, for example — and not just her husband.
[In terms of] how all this came together, there was this back and forth exchange of physical pieces of paper. It all happened relatively quickly, from May to June 2024. And the [final] list achieved the objective of freeing people who would overshadow the morally sickening part of this exchange. Alsu Kurmasheva, Evan Gershkovich, Ilya Yashin, Vladimir Kara-Murza — these are names that resonated as intended.
— Was there anyone that Russia refused to exchange?
— No. Unless you believe that Putin killed Navalny [so as not to free him]. We don’t take a position on this in the book, but it’s certainly a plausible explanation. Navalny’s family recently said there’s evidence that he was poisoned, so I’d like to learn more.
After Evan’s arrest, someone explained to us that in the Russian system, the concepts of reciprocity and symmetry are very important. Evan had been accused of espionage, so they would only exchange him for someone who had been charged or convicted of espionage. They don’t care that he’s a journalist. Espionage is espionage, and that’s it. Krasikov was the person that they wanted, and they were never going to trade Evan for anyone accused of lesser crimes.
— You write in the book that Western officials were afraid that if they made this exchange happen, it would lead to more arrests all over the world. What effect has it had so far?
— Right now, I think we’re in this phase where Putin and [U.S. President Donald] Trump are feeling each other out, and Trump is betting that Putin wants a good relationship with him and the United States more than he wants to continue the war [in Ukraine]. At this point, it’s not a bet that’s looking very good, but it’s the one Trump placed.
In his discussions with Trump over the future of Ukraine and the Russia–U.S. relationship, Putin never says “no.” He says, “yes, but” — yes, we can talk about making peace in Ukraine, but we need to address some of these “root causes.” And the “but” is effectively a way of saying no. However, in the meantime, they’re stacking up all these things they could do with the U.S. Obviously they’ve talked about energy deals and [Kremlin envoy Kirill] Dmitriev is even on record talking about the possibility of a prisoner exchange. They’re stacking up carrots on the table and saying, “Once you see the conflict our way and we’re able to resolve it, look at all these things we could do.” And that includes prisoner trades.
This game can only continue for so long, and the question is, what will happen when the rubber band snaps? I really can’t say, I have no inside information. But I’ve been watching this play out long enough to know that if you’re a Russian national or even an ethnic Russian who’s been serving the state and you get extradited to the U.S., there’s a good chance you are not going to serve out your whole term and that one day you’ll be put on a plane home. It’s just how this game is played. And there’s always more Americans that Russia can arrest.
Interview by Mikita Kucynski