UPDATE: It's official.
Finally, hope of progress. Wall St. Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich is included in a pending swap of prisoners who were held in Russia. Via The Daily Beast:
Rumors flew Wednesday that such a deal between Russia and the U.S. and their respective allies could include Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was detained by Russian authorities in March 2023.
Earlier this month, Gershkovich was sentenced to 16 years in a high-security penal colony under espionage charges internationally condemned as fabricated.
Moscow previously said that there was no chance of Gershkovich being exchanged until after his sentencing. On Tuesday, the Kremlin declined to comment to Reuters on the possibility of a swap involving the journalist. A spokesperson for The Wall Street Journal did not immediately return a request for comment on Wednesday afternoon.
But two sources involved in the negotiations—investigative journalists Christo Grozev and Roman Dobrokhotov—confirmed to The Daily Beast that the swap was on.
Fox News reported that jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was set to return to the United States as part of a prisoner exchange, possibly later on Thursday.
[...] Pervy Otdel (First Department), an association that specialises in defending people in Russian cases of treason and espionage, said the flight could mean that a prisoner exchange had taken place on the Polish border.
Reuters could not confirm that and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, when asked about reports of a looming major prisoner exchange, said: "I'm still not making any comments on this."
Paul Whelan, a former U.S. marine, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian-British dissident, both jailed in Russia, have suddenly disappeared from view, their lawyers said a day earlier, after at least seven Russian dissidents were unexpectedly moved from their prisons in recent days.
So of course Putin wins. He has no incentive to stop taking U.S. prisoners and accusing them of espionage, because he can always swap them for his thugs and assassins. But on the bright side, he's not delaying the release of Evan Gershkovich to help Trump.
