President Joe Biden met with the sister of Paul Whelan, a former Marine detained in Russia, on Wednesday.
Elizabeth Whelan met with Biden and national security adviser Jake Sullivan Wednesday afternoon “to discuss the administration’s continued efforts to secure Paul’s release from Russia,” the White House said in a statement. After their meeting, Biden called Paul Whelan’s parents.
Paul Whelan was arrested in late 2018 while in Russia for a wedding and was sentenced to 16 years in prison in June 2020 on an espionage charge that both he and the U.S. government strongly reject. Similarly, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested by the Federal Security Service in March 2023 while on a reporting trip in Yekaterinburg on espionage charges that he, his employer, and the U.S. government have decried as fraudulent.
“Since the beginning of the Administration, the President has been personally engaged in the effort to secure the release of Americans held hostages and wrongfully detained around the world, including Paul Whelan and fellow American Evan Gershkovich,” the White House’s statement added.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said last month that Russia turned down a “new and significant proposal” for Gershkovich and Paul Whelan’s return.
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“We have made clear all along we want — that we do not want to leave either one of them behind. We want to bring both Evan and Paul home,” Miller said at the time. “They received the proposal. We know that they — let me just say they rejected it. This was not a case of them not having responded to us. They rejected the offer that was on the table.”
The Biden administration agreed to two prisoner exchanges with the Kremlin in 2022 to secure the releases of Trevor Reed and Brittney Griner, neither of whom were charged under the guise of espionage. U.S. officials have said multiple times that the Kremlin views espionage charges as a more serious offense and that that had made negotiations for Paul Whelan and Gershkovich’s release more difficult.
