Six months from retirement and in desperate need of a foreign policy win, President Joe Biden just got one with the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, U.S. citizen Paul Whelan, Washington Post columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza, and 13 other prisoners from Russia. The Americans, working with Germany, Poland, Slovenia, and Norway, agreed to send eight convicted prisoners back to Russia, the most infamous being Vadim Krasikov, a veteran of the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan and a Russian intelligence operative who, in 2019, gunned down a Chechen dissident in the heart of Berlin. 

The Biden administration, in cooperation with European allies, was working on a possible prisoner swap even before Gershkovich was arbitrarily nabbed by the Russians, tried on trumped-up espionage charges, and sentenced in mid-July to 16 years in prison. The reporter’s unjustified incarceration was a terrible episode, first and foremost, for his family, who lived through the last 19 months in agony, not knowing whether they would ever see him again. But it was also a painful episode for Biden and his national security team. In December 2022, months before Gershkovich’s imprisonment, the White House received considerable criticism when it traded convicted arms trafficker Viktor Bout for WNBA star Brittney Griner.