Evan Gershkovich’s mother, Ella, arrived for an urgent 10:30 a.m. meeting at the White House with President Biden, on Thursday, the 491st day of son’s detention. She had been told to bring her husband Mikhail and her daughter Danielle in a three-minute call that ended with a strict instruction: Tell no one.
Five thousand miles away, Evan Gershkovich was in his final hours in Russia’s custody, aboard a Tupolev-204 government jet bound for a Turkish airport where orange-vested security personnel were waiting nervously. The Wall Street Journal reporter, 32 years old, had been documenting Russia’s descent into repression when agents grabbed him from a steakhouse and turned him into the story he’d been trying to cover. Now he was set to be a central component in one of the most complicated prisoner swaps in history.
Across Europe, planes were ferrying the other human pieces of a fragile puzzle: among them, two other Americans and eight Russians who had together served decades in political prisons and penal colonies. They ranged from hardened dissidents who had braved poisoning and hunger strikes to ordinary Americans who found themselves reduced to bargaining chips in a yearslong geopolitical tug of war with Vladimir Putin .
The price for their freedom was being flown from Germany on a Gulfstream jet, landing near the Turkish VIP terminal where Russia would collect him. Vadim Krasikov was a professional hit man who had gunned down an exile in broad daylight in a Berlin park. He was the man the Russian president wanted to bring home.
“The Russian Federation will not leave me to rot in jail,” the murderer once told a guard.
For 16 months, Ella Milman had studied the assassin’s case, daunted that such a man could be the key to unlocking her son’s freedom. She was one of an extraordinary cast of characters who worked in the shadows to advance the swap. Her son’s fate rested not just on messages ferried by diplomats and spies, but years of secret interventions drawn from the ranks of prime-time TV hosts, Silicon Valley billionaires and Russian oligarchs. An unlikely duo of Tucker Carlson and Hillary Clinton had each played walk-on roles to propel talks forward.
Evan Gershkovich’s parents, Ella Milman and Mikhail Gershkovich, at The Wall Street Journal’s offices in New York. Photo: Natalie Keyssar for WSJ
At the center of the struggle were the U.S. and Germany, two allies grappling with the moral and strategic calculus of freeing guilty prisoners to bring their innocent citizens home. If the U.S. once claimed a “no concessions” policy, that principle has been steadily eroded by one precedent after the next. To respond to Putin and other hostage-taking autocrats, the State Department staffed an entire office of roughly two dozen personnel, led by a former Green Beret who jetted around Europe and the Middle East to explore prisoner trades that might free Gershkovich and others.
Somehow along the way, a mother living in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia found herself stuck between the two most powerful governments in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance, ferrying messages that she hoped could free her son.
While Gershkovich was just released on Thursday morning, the Journal has been reporting on his fate from the moment he was seized. This account is based on more than a year of interviews with dozens of U.S., Russian, European and Middle Eastern national security officials, diplomats, spies, and prisoners’ families. Reporters reviewed classified Russian legal documents, security camera footage from arrests and unpublished photos of previous prisoner swaps to identify key players in the drama. A Journal reporter was on-site in Ankara to watch as Gershkovich stepped out into freedom.
Journal reporters were also, unavoidably, part of the story, followed through the streets of Vienna and Washington and, in one case, summoned for questioning by Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB. Reporters crisscrossed Western capitals, sitting with intelligence officials who insisted that no electronic devices be brought into the meetings and in some cases, communicating through handwritten notes to avoid leaving a data trail.
The newspaper had, in fact, been investigating the story of Russia’s hostage-taking spree since early 2023, when its Russia correspondent Evan Gershkovich encouraged his colleagues to investigate Putin’s brazen strategy of seizing Americans on spurious charges and trading them as hostage. “It’s totally undercovered,” he said then.
‘Have you been in touch with Evan?’
Evan Gershkovich’s phone had stopped pinging .
His colleagues hadn’t heard from him since the morning, when he arrived in Yekaterinburg, east of the Urals. It was March 29, 2023, and he was there to interview a source about Russia’s astonishing pace in refurbishing tanks bound for Ukraine. They planned to meet at the Bukowski Grill, off Lenin Avenue, by 4 p.m.
Russia’s defense production was a topic pro-government newscasters had reported openly, with pride, as their country defied foreign sanctions to rev up a war economy. But in Putin’s 23rd year in charge, new threats to the international press were emerging.
Weeks earlier, a reporter friend of Gershkovich from another news organization had sat statue-still in a Moscow flat, the lights out, waiting for a police team banging on the door to leave. A few hours later, a lawyer helped the reporter slip out of Russia. It was, in hindsight, a warning shot.
“Hey buddy, good luck today,” a colleague had messaged Gershkovich the morning he arrived in Yekaterinburg.
“Thanks brotha,” replied Gershkovich. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”
The American son of Soviet Jewish exiles, the reporter was flourishing in the land his parents had fled. A cook for a catering company inspired by Anthony Bourdain to chase the life of a roving correspondent, he arrived in 2017 to a Russian capital still open to inquisitive foreigners. The New Jersey native known to his Russian friends as “Vanya” sought out its dive bars and pop-up restaurants, soaking up stories and jumping at any chance to explore Russia’s 6.6 million square miles.
He had camped with firefighters for four days near a raging Siberian wildfire—long after other reporters had jetted back to Moscow—telling friends, “I just want to get the story right.” At night, he practiced typing then recrafting the first paragraph, or lede, of news stories, a routine he referred to as “doing reps.” He wore baggy faded bluejeans to news conferences and charmed suited ministers who weren’t accustomed to being addressed in the informal, colloquial Russian Gershkovich had spoken since childhood.
But as the war in Ukraine unfolded, officials turned hostile, friends fled, and sources he had known were being jailed. Unidentified men had followed him through the streets as he churned out front-page scoops that challenged the Kremlin’s official narrative of the Ukraine invasion. Still, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs kept renewing his press cards and three-month visas with no complaint. The trip to Yekaterinburg, his second in a month, was meant to be short.
That evening, his phone was still off.
“Have you been in touch with Evan?” a Journal reporter texted a security manager at 10:12 p.m. Yekaterinburg time, 1:12 p.m. in Washington.
From London, New York and Warsaw, Journal staff logged on to video calls and dialed up contacts in Yekaterinburg and Moscow. Another notified the paper’s publisher, Almar Latour , who was touring Robben Island, the Alcatraz-style jail off Cape Town where Nelson Mandela served 18 years in prison. One reporter managed to reach Gershkovich’s driver, who stopped by the apartment he had booked, but found only dark windows: “Let’s hope for the best,” he said. Another repeatedly called a local journalist Gershkovich had hired to help arrange some interviews, who now appeared to be drunk and mumbling.
As midnight passed in Moscow, the Journal called government contacts in Washington, sending notes to the State Department and the White House. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken called back, he pledged, “We will get him back.”
Meanwhile, the paper had to inform his mother, Ella. At 6:16 p.m. at her home in Philadelphia, she got a text from Managing Editor Liz Harris asking her to call. Her son, Harris said, was missing.
Ella was in shock: “What do I do?” she asked.
Soon, her instincts took hold. A skeptical and intuitive mother of two raised in Soviet Leningrad—now St. Petersburg—Ella began scrolling through Russian and American news sources for clues on what had happened to him. He had been charged with espionage, she read, as the news broke around 3 a.m. She learned her son had last been seen at a restaurant 900 miles east of Moscow.
Thumbing out a message to the managing editor, she asked: “Can you give the name of the restaurant please.”
Inside the operation to seize Gershkovich
Over an encrypted video link, Vladimir Putin was also taking a call.
The mustachioed head of the First Service of Russia’s FSB security agency, Gen. Vladislav Menschikov, was briefing the president on Gershkovich’s arrest, down to the minor details.
Menschikov had once been in charge of Putin’s nuclear bunkers, but now ran the sprawling FSB division that included the Department for Counter Intelligence Operations, or DKRO, a secretive unit that surveilled Americans and had led the operation to seize Gershkovich. Its officers would send up intel on exactly which stories foreign reporters were pursuing, compiled into memos for Putin marked “Personal, Secret,” that described unflattering articles as “anti-Russian actions” orchestrated by Washington. Days earlier, Menschikov had given Putin a briefing on the plan to arrest Gershkovich. Now the president wanted to know how his security services had performed.
The Russian president was raising the stakes in a geopolitical poker game he believed the Americans started. In 2008, in a Bangkok hotel suite, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration sent informants posing as Colombian terrorists to buy surface-to-air missiles from Viktor Bout , an arms trafficker with alleged links to Russia’s security services immortalized in the Nicolas Cage film “Lord of War.” The informants explained the missiles would be useful for shooting down U.S. helicopters. When he agreed to the sale, agents burst in to arrest him. In 2010, the DEA conducted another sting to arrest a former Russian air force pilot, Konstantin Yaroshenko , this time using informants in Liberia who were working with him to smuggle cocaine.
To the DEA, these were successful arrests of dangerous criminals in keeping with the new post-9/11 imperative to snuff out transnational threats. Putin felt Bout and Yaroshenko had been entrapped by a superpower without jurisdiction to arrest Russians in faraway Asia or Africa. Russian diplomats called for their release but were rebuffed by the administrations of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump .
Putin, a former KGB officer and FSB director himself steeped in the dark arts of entrapment, revealed his response in 2018. The FSB arrested Paul Whelan, a former Marine visiting Moscow for a friend’s wedding, and charged him with espionage, which the Michigan native and his government both denied. If America wanted Whelan home, it should free Bout, Putin’s foreign-policy adviser told a U.S. ambassador days later. When the Trump administration balked, Russian police struck again eight months later, arresting another former Marine, Trevor Reed, on assault charges that both he and the U.S. government denied. Reed had once served on Vice President Biden’s Camp David protective guard.
When Biden became president, Putin met him by the fireplace of a lakeside Geneva mansion and proposed the two sides’ intelligence services create a channel to explore prisoner trades—a throwback to the Cold War, and a way to circumvent the State Department diplomats Russians found preachy. Biden, eager to free Americans and ease tensions with Russia, agreed. Even as Putin invaded Ukraine just months later, negotiations in that channel led to the trading of Reed for Yaroshenko, and later Bout for Brittney Griner, a WNBA star caught at Moscow airport in early 2022 with vape cartridges containing less than a gram of medically prescribed hash oil , illegal in Russia.
Grabbing Americans, Putin had proved, freed Russians. And there was another prisoner Putin wanted, a 58-year-old serving a life sentence in Germany.
Vadim Krasikov’s crime was murder .
Since 2021, Putin had been pushing his national security council officials on secure video calls to bring back the aging veteran of the Soviet-Afghan war. The two of them had been so close that they visited a gun range together. Putin “shoots well,” Krasikov had told his family.
The president seemed so loyal to the twice-married father of three that Western intelligence officials speculated that he had been Putin’s personal bodyguard; close Russia analysts suspected their ties dated back to the president’s time as deputy mayor of mafia-plagued St. Petersburg. Dressed in designer clothes, Krasikov earned $10,000 monthly, plus bonuses for what he told his family were business trips. His wife, housed in an upscale Moscow flat, complained to family members that he bought Porsches and BMWs so frequently that she never had time to get accustomed to driving them. He washed his hands compulsively and manicured his nails.
In 2019, Krasikov had slipped into Berlin using a Russian passport for “Vadim Sokolov.” Then, in broad daylight, as dozens of park goers, servers and diners at a nearby restaurant watched, he fatally shot a Chechen exile near a playground. Arrested while trying to change out of a wig and flee on an electric scooter, the bald and goateed gunman hardly spoke a word throughout his entire murder trial. He didn’t even tell investigators his name, which remained a secret until a Bulgarian investigative journalist named Christo Grozev helped uncover it.
The killer acted on his own, Putin would later suggest, “due to patriotic sentiments.”
In 2022, Russia had offered to free Whelan, the former Marine, if America would get Germany to give up Krasikov. The White House had notified Berlin of the idea, but neither government was eager to free a professional killer for an ordinary American prisoner. It was, on the surface, an inconceivable demand. But in March, two weeks before Evan’s arrest, FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov told CIA Director William Burns that Putin remained intent on trading Krasikov for Whelan. Days later, Gershkovich himself texted a colleague: “They keep stupidly asking for him,” he wrote. “The Germans obviously won’t go for that.”
And yet Russia’s president was convinced otherwise. A young Putin had served in Dresden with the KGB, when West Germany was still an American satellite. Now at the pinnacle of his power, he had never reconciled himself to the notion that unified Germany, Europe’s powerhouse, couldn’t be swayed by U.S. pressure.
If the Biden administration wouldn’t exchange Krasikov for Whelan, then perhaps they would for the correspondent of a major U.S. newspaper.
Seeking help from ‘the most rational man on the planet’
Ella hadn’t slept for days, receiving so many calls she’d lost her voice, while incessantly googling the case of the first foreign reporter charged with espionage since the Cold War. Her son was now facing up to 20 years in prison. With her husband Mikhail, she was reading everything she could about the cases of former Marine Paul Whelan, still in a jail somewhere east of Moscow, and basketball player Brittney Griner, who had been traded for an arms dealer. She started to log her meetings and the contacts of people who might help her in a green reportorial notebook. In her research, she noticed the name of a convicted murderer in Berlin who seemed to be close to Vladimir Putin. Had Evan been taken to try to bring him back?
Raised in the same Leningrad as Putin, around the same time, Ella was raised by a Jewish mother who had treated Holocaust survivors as a wartime nurse in Poland. Her father, a Soviet army medic, had reached Berlin in 1945. As a girl, she’d noticed her mother never cried, and when her father died young, found a way to game the arcane Soviet housing system to keep the family apartment. Now Ella would have to show the same resolve and ingenuity if she was going to help her son.
In Washington, Gershkovich’s arrest had landed on President Biden’s daily brief while analysts at the CIA headquarters ran an “equities check” to be sure that he wasn’t somehow working for the U.S. government.
It quickly came back negative, and within two weeks Gershkovich was officially listed as “wrongfully detained.” That opened the door for a little-known federal entity to take his case, offering access to a network of government structures meant to quietly resolve kidnapping crises.
A man with the title of special presidential envoy for hostage affairs met Ella at a Philadelphia restaurant, welcoming her to the “tragic community” of families he served. Roger Carstens was a former Green Beret lieutenant colonel who’d appeared in a reality TV show before being appointed by President Trump. He told her of the faraway countries where he had freed hostages, finding ways to trade prisoners, lift sanctions, or drop prosecutions in return. His enthusiasm for retrieving U.S. citizens, even at steep costs, proved so popular among families of missing Americans that they persuaded President Biden to keep him on.
Roger Carstens in the family room of the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. Photo: Kent Nishimura for WSJ
A veteran of six wars, Carstens would remove his glasses when talking to prisoners’ families to wipe away tears before quoting passages from the Bible or ancient Greek texts he thought spoke to the pain of hostage-taking. He liked to say he “only hired optimists.” His admirers—drawn to his ardor for the job—and detractors—who considered him a bit of a showboat—both referred to him by the same nickname: “Captain America.”
Studying Carstens as he pledged to move heaven and earth to retrieve her son, Ella intuited that he held little authority at the highest level and no swift solution. Ella dialed other Americans who’d made it home from Russia. Griner wasn’t available but the basketball player’s agent was. She learned Carstens rarely met the president, and had to work in the margins to advance ideas. Instead, her son’s file, wrapped up with Russian affairs, would be tightly controlled by Jake Sullivan, a more cautious and calculating career policymaker, a contrast in personalities she would have to navigate.
The youngest national security adviser since the Camelot cabinet of John F. Kennedy, Sullivan had quietly become the most powerful holder of the role since Henry Kissinger . A policy prodigy who’d won the Rhodes, Marshall and Truman scholarships, the 47-year-old only somewhat facetiously called himself “the most rational man on the planet.” Hillary Clinton, who read a Bible verse at his wedding, called him a “once-in-a-generation talent.”
Carefully measuring the weight of each word, he could debate the minutiae of Chinese biotechnology subsidies or Iran sanctions, while dissecting Ukraine’s ongoing battle in Bakhmut down to the city block. On his otherwise bare desk, he kept buttons and postcards from the families of Americans held wrongfully overseas, and several mediators working with him to free them came away impressed by how deeply, if dispassionately, he knew each case. Yet they also used the same phrase to describe a frequent hitch in his decision-making: “paralysis by analysis.”
Sullivan regularly carved out time to decode the moral calculus of negotiating with kidnappers and countries that behaved like them—none so complicated as Russia. The puzzle would be to free Gershkovich, honoring the president’s duty toward an unlawfully detained American, without encouraging autocrats to grab some other reporter, somewhere. For now, the White House would send the Kremlin a straightforward message: Gershkovich was not a spy and must be released immediately.
A Navalny strategy takes shape
Carstens that month stepped into a Georgetown restaurant, the reservation discreetly booked under another name, to meet an unusual guest proposing an alternative path forward: Christo Grozev, the Bulgarian journalist who had revealed Krasikov’s identity after the Berlin murder. The soft-spoken 55-year-old was one of the world’s leading investigators of Russian clandestine operators. Often, the evidence he plumbed to track their movements was hiding in plain sight, including the photos they clumsily left on social media, or in bulk-purchased smartphone data normally sold to advertisers. This way, he had unmasked so many agents that intelligence services in Vienna, his home of over 20 years, said they couldn’t protect him. Wanted in Russia, but residing in America, he was guarded by Austria’s elite Cobra forces and transported in an armored car whenever he visited Vienna to see his wife and children. Visiting the country of his birth, he wouldn’t even leave the airport.
Pulling out a cocktail napkin, the journalist jotted Carstens a two-column list of Russian prisoners who the U.S. could trade for Gershkovich and Whelan, the incarcerated Marine. But these low-ranking Russian nobodies would be decorative adornments tacked onto the big ticket exchange that Grozev had been championing for a year. The German government would release the hit man Krasikov, in return for one of Grozev’s dearest friends, Russia’s most famous dissident: Alexei Navalny .
Weeks earlier, Grozev had accepted a best documentary Oscar, for “Navalny,” as the celebrity crowd cheered wildly. Navalny’s life was the stuff of Hollywood legend: a protest leader slowly dying in a Siberian prison. Navalny had dared to uncover Putin’s personal wealth, the corruption at the heart of the regime. He’d identified Putin’s secret, $1.2 billion palace on the Black Sea coast, in a riveting YouTube video seen by more than a quarter of all Russian adults. Putin loathed him.
Tall and handsome with bright blue eyes, Navalny was a folk hero in Germany, whose government had helped him leave Russia, saving his life in 2020, after a nerve-agent poisoning left him in a coma. Berlin, Grozev explained, was open to freeing Krasikov in return for this death-defying dissident. The other Russian prisoners on the napkin—of no particular importance—could be bundled with imprisoned Americans into one big deal.
The problem, in Grozev’s telling, was that the U.S. and Germany were both more willing to press ahead with this morally complex trade than the other fully appreciated. He had helped persuade Hillary Clinton to lobby the German government, to articulate the possibility of a deal. But a year had passed since then. Shortly after Gershkovich’s arrest, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt had spoken to President Biden and explained that Germany would be amenable to a possible prisoner exchange for Navalny. There was a pathway, Grozev told Carstens, who would relay the idea to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Sullivan. But it would be fraught with misgivings in Washington and Berlin at the thought of freeing a professional killer. They would have to devise ways to advance it informally.
Sullivan, the national security adviser, had also reached out to his Berlin counterpart, Jens Plötner, to discuss the Navalny idea, which Plötner warned was a complicated ask. The country’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock , was aghast at the precedent of freeing a career murderer sent by Putin to kill an exile in a country that prided itself on providing safe haven to refugees. Justice, intelligence, and law-enforcement officials shared her revulsion. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz ’s polling numbers were low, inflation was high, and his coalition was weak. But Plötner pledged to take it up to Scholz.
The chancellor discussed it that month with top aides, in the office where he kept a framed congratulatory letter from President Biden. There were no phones, laptops or smartwatches allowed: The Russians had perched a nest of electronic surveillance systems on the roof of their Stalin-era embassy nearby, which looked directly down onto his spartan workplace.
Freeing Krasikov for Navalny would be politically difficult, Scholz said, but possible and for him, personal. Scholz had gone to shake the hand of the dissident in 2020, back when the nerve agent survivor was still learning to speak and walk again yet already vowing to return to Russia to contest Putin. Scholz had become emotional afterward, telling an aide that Navalny was “a man of immense courage.”
Releasing Krasikov, however, would mean overriding the legal opinion drafted by his own government lawyers arguing against a swap. What Berlin needed was political cover—for America, the superpower that protected Germany, to submit an official request. Meanwhile, to preserve their bargaining strength, Russia couldn’t know how open the chancellor was to freeing Putin’s hit man.
That same month, Scholz’s chief of staff, Wolfgang Schmidt, met a group of Journal reporters and editors, at an office about a mile from the murder site, and relayed the message. “It may not be easy for us, but it’s possible,” he said.
How to survive in a Russian prison
Gershkovich’s first letter arrived in April, running two pages, in handwritten Russian.
“Mom…I am trying to write. Maybe, finally, I am going to write something good.”
He signed off: “Until we meet soon. Write me.”
The reporter was spending 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in a 9-foot-by-12 foot cell in the infamous jail where Stalin’s henchman once tortured thousands of enemies of the state. Set in a pastel yellow complex off a leafy street on Moscow’s outskirts, Lefortovo was run by the FSB and designed to make its inmates feel entirely alone. Its sterile corridors were unnervingly quiet save for the echo of slamming cell doors and the jangling of guards’ keys.
Barred from seeing U.S. Embassy officials, Gershkovich’s contact with the outside world came mainly from letters that arrived after passing through censors. Friends were writing to keep his spirits up and sending him care packages with some of the things he didn’t have: dried food, coffee and sugar. A journalist who had been detained in Africa wrote with some tips the former cook quickly adopted: never eat rotten food, establish a routine, look after your body, and keep your space immaculately clean.
When not in his cell, Gershkovich was called to the interrogation room of chief investigator Alexei Khizhnyak, the same FSB interrogator who had once questioned the former Marine, Whelan. Khizhnyak faced prisoners across a T-shaped wooden table, in a room watched over by Che Guevara, Soviet security services’ founder Felix Dzerzhinsky and two portraits of Vladimir Putin. Whelan had said during his pretrial investigation that Khizhnyak had threatened to kill him and asked for him to be taken off the case, a request that was denied.
But as their interrogations stretched for hours, Gershkovich learned that Khizhnyak also shared a passion for soccer and literature. The interrogator was a fan of English Premier League club Liverpool, while Gershkovich, a high school state soccer champion, supported rival club Arsenal. Gershkovich was reading “Life and Fate,” the World War II epic by Soviet war correspondent Vasily Grossman, and Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” followed by dozens of other books, which he and Khizhnyak discussed. He was determined to leave prison a better writer than he’d arrived.
Ella was writing weekly letters to Evan, recounting the history of a family that had survived the Russian Civil War, the World War II, Soviet antisemitism—“and now this is our turn,” she wrote. In April of last year she had rushed up to President Biden at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and grabbed his hands before imploring him: “You are the only one who can bring my boy home.”
Appearing on “Good Morning America,” she recalled Evan joking that Russian prison gruel reminded him of the porridge she’d raised him on. She was worried he was reading too many dark and voluminous tomes drawn from Russia’s tragic past, and suggested he swap out the Stalin-era literature for lighter reads.
In June, Ella and her husband Mikhail traveled to Moscow to attend her son’s appeal hearing, ignoring the advice of the FBI that they might also be arrested. The court camera captured a brief conversation: mother standing next to her son in the glass cage, Gershkovich tilting his head in laughter as she admonished him to be more careful in what he was writing in his letters. “He was making fun of me. It is always his way,” she said.
Like his mother, Gershkovich was building a wall to cope with his ordeal, but as she studied him she could also see he was pacing in the cage, biting his lip and full of nervous energy.
To attest to her son’s good character, Ella, who’d grown up hearing haunting stories of the Soviet secret services, agreed to be interrogated. Alone in the waiting room, she could see people were watching her behind a tinted pane of glass. She saw a cat in the corridor, confiscated, she was told, from a woman jailed for supporting Ukraine. She was escorted to the office of her son’s interrogator, Khizhnyak, who was sitting behind a T-shaped table. Ella had pinned a large badge on her green cardigan: “Free Evan.”
Khizhnyak began with pro forma questions:
“Do you have any head injuries? Are you taking medication?”
Over four hours and 15 minutes, he moved onto Gershkovich’s background. The reporter was working for the U.S. government, he said. He was recruited as a spy at university, he added. No he wasn’t, Ella retorted. Was her son a homosexual? Why didn’t she know the name of his girlfriend? It felt, she later said, “totally bizarre.”
At one point, Ella was distracted by a smell she hadn’t detected for about 40 years, the waft of a cabbage soup popular during Soviet times when rationing was still in force. “Is that Shchi?” she asked. It was, Khizhnyak confirmed. And that was what her son was having for his lunch.
When Ella emerged from the prison, Mikhail said she’d been so long he was worried she’d been arrested.
Before their flight back to the U.S. from Moscow, the couple was stopped, then asked to turn in their passports. Their Russian visas were being annulled.
An immigration official dismissed them with a wave of the hand: “Go to New York.”
Ella meets the German Chancellor
The campaign to free Gershkovich appeared to be firing on all cylinders. His face looked down from a 10-story digital billboard on Times Square and banners at the stadiums of the New York Mets and Arsenal. In the Senate, leaders from both parties had demanded his release, backed by parliaments in the U.K. and continental Europe. Sec. Blinken had shown Ella a list in his jacket pocket, of Americans color-coded black for those still jailed and red for those retrieved.
“Free Evan,” read pins on the blazers of reporters across the U.S. and Europe.
Yet so far, more Americans were vanishing into Russian jails than coming home. In June, Russia took two more U.S. citizens, including another journalist, Alsu Kurmasheva, an editor at Radio Free Europe, later charged with spreading “false information” about Russia’s military. Biden weighed in the next month, telling reporters “I’m serious about a prisoner exchange, I’m serious about doing all we can to free Americans being illegally held in Russia or anywhere else.”
In Philadelphia, Ella and her husband Mikhail were regularly stepping out to neighborhood restaurants to strategize with the Journal’s legal and executive team. By late summer, Ella had built up a contact network of sympathetic sources in the government. One Justice Department official had opened up to her after she’d sat down next to him on a train and asked for help. Another source kept her apprised when Victoria Nuland, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, took a meeting regarding her son. In prison letters, mother and son traded Kremlinology, using a coded nickname for the hit man Krasikov: “the German.” The Journal’s general counsel, who now turned to her for info, dubbed her “Ella the Reporter.”
Seeing her as an obvious asset, Journal leaders encouraged her networking. In September, Latour, the Journal’s publisher, helped her access the Very Very Important Persons section at a gala dinner at Cipriani in Manhattan thrown by the Atlantic Council think tank, where he was a board member. Her plan was to buttonhole Germany’s ambassador to Washington, but as she swiped through Google Image results to be sure she’d recognize him, she looked up to see Scholz himself.
The chancellor was hobnobbing with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky . As he stepped aside, Ella walked up and pleaded for help freeing her son, Scholz understood immediately who she was, but had to quickly leave.
“We are helping. We are doing something,” he replied. The brief meeting left her confused about what was happening behind the scenes. She relayed the encounter to Carstens’s office. The special envoy, in turn, asked Grozev, the Bulgarian journalist, for the email address to Scholz’s chief of staff. Carstens had been asked to hold off on contacting Berlin, but he spoke German, had lived there and wasn’t always inclined to obey orders. He connected to the chancellery, which said a deal was possible. It would require a formal request. Carstens fed that up to Blinken.
In October, Sullivan, the national security adviser, called Plötner, his German counterpart. There was still no consensus in the German government, as Germany’s foreign minister and other government departments remained apprehensive. Berlin was hoping a formal, legal request from the U.S. would break the deadlock.
Meanwhile, the White House tried to see if Russia would accept a bundle of Russians convicted of nonviolent charges. The problem was, the U.S. penitentiary system was holding very few Russians the Kremlin might conceivably want. At one point, Carstens’s staff, scrounging for stock to trade, became so desperate that they haphazardly searched for Russian names on PACER, a publicly-available database of federal court records. Swept up onto the list: a U.S. citizen with a Russian-sounding name, who was only removed when an official pointed out the U.S. couldn’t send its own citizens to Russia.
In November, Washington offered the Kremlin four undercover operatives for Russia’s military and foreign intelligence agencies, held in Europe: so-called “illegals” who spent years creating a legend, or false identity. Two of them had been arrested in the tiny Alpine nation of Slovenia living as “ Maria and Ludwig ,” on false Argentine passports, who spoke to their children, and each other, in Spanish. In their suburban home, police found hundreds of thousands of euros in a hidden refrigerator compartment and specialized computer hardware to communicate securely with Moscow.
There was a third—a Russian military intelligence officer using the identity of a Brazilian academic called “Jose”—in Norway. Poland had arrested the fourth, a Moscow-born Spanish journalist, on espionage charges near the Ukraine border.
Washington’s offer, meant to keep talks going, left Moscow frustrated. A prominent Russian intelligence officer backchannelled in texts to Grozev, the Bulgarian journalist, to ask why they couldn’t just trade Gershkovich for Krasikov? Russia had already decided to sentence him to 16 years, why not plead guilty and be swapped?
To Ella, Washington’s proposals were unserious. She decided to go on Fox News and throw a hand grenade.
“It’s been 250 days and Evan is not here, and the effort to do whatever it takes hasn’t been done,” she said in a slow, deliberate sound bite she’d rehearsed in her head.
Carstens, the special envoy, applauded the move and said he would show it to other families as an example of how to pressure the White House. But, to some in the administration, the interview was received as friendly fire. That afternoon, a State Department spokesman broke the secrecy around prisoner talks and told reporters that the U.S. had sent Russia “a number of proposals” for Gershkovich, none of them accepted. The Russians, who insisted such talks take place beyond public scrutiny, recoiled at the breach of protocol.
Ella had wanted to try to shake something loose, but scrolling through Russian media, she feared she had caused the talks to collapse.
”The U.S. government has literally turned on a kind of megaphone,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry complained days later. “The U.S. campaign in support of Gershkovich is literally drowning and discrediting him.”
Putin names his price
Staring out into an auditorium packed with reporters, his shoulders slouched, Putin was about to signal publicly the same demand he had been reiterating privately since 2021: He wanted his hit man back.
Hundreds of journalists were waving placards in the air in the hopes of being called on. The president, who had rarely taken questions since invading Ukraine two years earlier, was finally facing the press at a December year-end conference. Though the moderator promised “a direct, honest, and open conversation,” the Kremlin had screened and approved the overwhelmingly flattering questions in advance. One question came from a New York Times reporter and friend of Gershkovich: Why hadn’t the reporter been freed?
Putin began his response by saying he didn’t know details of the journalist whose arrest he’d ordered on a video call months earlier—“your colleague was from an Austrian agency?”—before delivering a cryptic message, aimed at the Biden administration.
“I hope that we will find a solution,” he said. “But I repeat, the American side must hear us and make an appropriate decision. One that suits the Russian side as well.”
The subtext was clearly received in Berlin and Washington. When Sullivan again asked his German counterpart if Krasikov could be put on the table, he received word: not yet. But in Berlin, Scholz started moving pieces into place, telling cabinet members that he would, eventually, receive a formal request from America to discuss a trade involving Krasikov, and whatever their misgivings, he would take responsibility. Germany’s foreign minister Baerbock worried freeing Krasikov would invite Putin and every autocrat who admired him to snatch more hostages—but Blinken was speaking to her at length to persuade her of the moral logic.
In January, Ella flew into the World Economic Forum in Davos to meet Schmidt, Chancellor Scholz’s chief of staff, to ask for help: “You have the key,” she said. Schmidt was quiet, then pledged to help. That same day, Scholz and Biden spoke by phone about a meeting, to discuss the matter, in the White House. By Feb. 2, the train was in motion.
“For you, I will do this,” Scholz told Biden.
Just as Berlin and Washington outlined how a deal would work, Moscow was dealing with an unexpected new interlocutor, Tucker Carlson.
The former Fox News host was hammering out terms for an interview with Putin for his new straight-to-social-media talk show. Carlson told the president’s aides that he planned to request Putin free Gershkovich on the spot, during the interview. If all went well, he would fly home with Evan on his flight. An official close to Putin told the TV host it would be a “great idea” and could generate a positive response.
Near the end of his two-hour conversation, Carlson pushed his point: “This guy is obviously not a spy, he’s just a kid.”
“He’s being held hostage in exchange…Maybe it degrades Russia to do that.”
Putin demurred, then specified publicly for the first time the person he wanted in return: “a person serving a sentence in an allied country of the U.S.,” he said, leaning forward with an eyebrow arched.
After the interview, as Putin led Tucker on a tour of the Kremlin that stretched near midnight, the TV commentator returned their conversation to Gershkovich: “Why are you doing this?…It’s hurting you.”
Putin complained the problem lay in Washington. Russia had made its demand for the reporter clear, he said. Putin lamented that America didn’t do more to bring home its alleged spies.
The same day the interview aired, chalking up 200 million views, Scholz flew into Washington, heading straight to the Oval Office, with no notetakers and no aides. At the end of an hourlong meeting with Biden, the leaders formally agreed: Their countries would explore Krasikov as the centerpiece of a deal that would free numerous prisoners, including Navalny, Gershkovich, and the former Marine Whelan. Russia would get its spies held in Slovenia and Norway.
Word of the Navalny idea had already reached Putin, months earlier. The Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich had been asking to see Carstens, although the special envoy had been discouraged from taking the meeting. When both men found themselves in Tel Aviv after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, they met and Carstens broached the idea of a larger trade involving Navalny.
A couple of weeks after that meeting, Abramovich messaged with a surprising response: Putin was open. Carstens told the White House, which asked him to stop dealing with Russia cases.
On Feb. 16, heads of government, top security advisers, and intelligence chiefs from the U.S. and its NATO allies were arriving to the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering in the Bavarian city. Vice President Kamala Harris would brief the Slovenian officials involved in the still-nascent deal.
FBI Director Christopher Wray , also briefed on the coming trade, would hold talks with intelligence chiefs from across the West. Putin’s loathing of the event was well known—he had used it as a platform to lecture Western leaders about a post Cold War order in which America was the “one master, one sovereign.”
Grozev was in town, meeting German officials to understand the contours of the emerging deal. With him were members of Navalny’s inner circle, at turns excited for his release and anxious that Putin might, at this last minute, finally murder him. Carstens, though not officially on the attendee list, was in Munich as well, holding meetings on the margins to push matters along.
Western spy chiefs were just about to be served appetizers at a working lunch, when phones around the table started pinging. Navalny had abruptly died, at 47, of unclear causes in Russia’s “Polar Wolf” prison camp. The Kremlin didn’t explain the death.
Blinken’s staff scrambled to reach Navalny’s newly widowed wife, Yulia, and bring her through security for an emotional meeting, then to the auditorium to make a statement. She had been in Munich to discreetly push for the final details of her husband’s release. Now she was giving his eulogy in front of the world’s press.
“I want Putin, his entire entourage, Putin’s friends, his government, to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family, to my husband,” she said. “And this day will come very soon.”
Afterward, Grozev sat with Carstens in a coffee shop outside the conference, mourning the death of his friend and a deal he had pushed for years in the shadows. The special envoy was blaming himself. Maybe, Carstens said, if he could have helped sew up a deal sooner, Navalny would be alive and free.
‘I can see a pathway’
Ella and Mikhail were rushing for the Amtrak train to Washington for a White House briefing on the emerging deal to free their son, when she looked at her phone and saw a cascade of text messages: The centerpiece of the exchange had died. She was shocked—then hopeful it could somehow create new urgency. Like her mom, she couldn’t allow herself despair.
“Unfortunately, whatever happened, happened,” Putin would later say, publicly uttering the name Navalny for the first time, and calling his chief opponent’s death a regrettable incident of the sort that also occurs in American prisons.
“It’s life.”
In the White House meeting, Sullivan, the national security adviser, had his head lowered toward the floor, avoiding eye contact. Carefully measuring every word, he explained to Ella and her husband Mikhail that he had always been skeptical that a deal involving Navalny would work out. But it wasn’t all lost, he said. Germany had already agreed to participate. “I can see a pathway,” he said.
On the world stage, Biden, Scholz and leaders of the European Union were condemning Putin. At Langley, CIA officers and analysts tried to make sense of the death and what it meant for an exchange.
The Biden administration was divided on whether and how to keep pushing forward. Returning quickly to the negotiating table could make the U.S. look too eager for a deal.
And did they need to give Germany time before rushing into a prisoner swap with a dictator accused of killing his most famous opponent?
By May, the German Federal Intelligence Service opened its own negotiation track with Russia, introducing its own stipulations: If they were going to release Krasikov, Berlin was going to want as many political prisoners and Germans facing draconian sentences in Russia as possible. Its chief pointman, former prosecutor Philipp Wolff, had become known in Berlin for an odd, if charming, negotiating tactic: Whenever talks grew testy, he would open up his briefcase and offer a chocolate.
Ella was at her second White House Correspondents’ Dinner that month and joined Biden’s handshake line to deliver another backchannel message, this time with more specificity. An official from Carstens’ office had told her to ask Biden to call the German leader to move things forward. And one of her sources had told her that it would be bad for Scholz to back out after making a commitment. To make her case, she’d have only seconds.
“We need more,” she said to the president. “Can you please call Chancellor Scholz?” Biden said he had made that call. Blinken, standing next to the president, looked down, then gently clarified, saying they would make the call. “I promise, I promise, I promise,” Biden said, before the handshake line moved on.
Two days later, President Biden sent a letter to Scholz, a formal request that gave the Chancellor the mechanism he needed to formalize a deal.
“Something like this has never been done before,” said Schmidt, the German chief of staff.
Through June and July U.S. intelligence officials met with their Russian counterparts in Middle Eastern capitals, while German negotiators held their own meetings. In Washington, Sullivan scrambled to sew up the deal just as an open insurrection erupted by Democrats hoping Biden would end his bid for a second term. Biden was hosting a July NATO summit, hoping a lively performance would quell doubts. At the summit, Sullivan seized the chance for a private word in person with European allies the U.S. was asking to free Russian spies. “We are almost there, you are doing an excellent job,” he told one delegation. The plan was set, and ready to “operationalize.”
Two days later, President Trump took a semiautomatic rifle shot to the ear, a quarter inch from his skull. Trump’s team had heard a deal was coming together. He had repeatedly said Putin would only free Gershkovich after he had won November’s election.
From self-quarantine in his Delaware home, Biden, testing positive for COVID-19, was tuning out frenzied speculation about his future to push the deal over its finish line. Slovenia still needed to tick through the final legal arrangements to ship back the spies it held—and time was running out. One Slovenian official texted a Journal reporter to say he was “shitting bricks.” Biden called Prime Minister Robert Golob to nudge things along, adding wistfully: “I’ve really got to get to Slovenia.” About an hour later, he announced he was leaving the presidential race.
The final deal coming together was unprecedented in its scale and complexity. It included Gershkovich and Krasikov, but also two other jailed journalists, Russian political prisoners, four Germans and the deep cover spies from Slovenia, Norway and Poland. The CIA director flew to Ankara, the site of the exchange, to discuss the logistics with Turkey’s spy chief. The agreement with Russia was fragile and one errant leak could blow the whole thing up.
Ella knew a trade was imminent when she went back to meet with Sullivan and noticed the national security adviser was looking her in the eyes. When Russia suddenly sped up her son’s trial into a three day process she understood. She stayed up all night on July 19, until the first images of his conviction came in, standing in the glass box of a packed Yekaterinburg courtroom, gaunt and tired, his head shaved as required by the Russian penal system. He stared out passively as a judge sentenced him to 16 years. Then, through his lawyers, he relayed a joke that reached his mother: He was expecting more.
The Russian Federation had a few final items of protocol to tick through with the man who had become its most famous prisoner. One, he would be allowed to leave with the papers he’d penned in detention, the letters he’d scrawled out and the makings of a book he’d labored over. But first, they had another piece of writing they required from him, an official request for presidential clemency. The text, moreover, should be addressed to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
The pro forma printout included a long blank space the prison could fill out if desired, or simply, as expected, leave blank. In the formal high Russian he had honed over 16 months imprisonment, the Journal’s Russia correspondent filled the page. The last line submitted a proposal of his own: After his release, would Putin be willing to sit down for an interview?
Write to Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com , Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com , Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com and Aruna Viswanatha at aruna.viswanatha@wsj.com
