Biden’s historic prisoner swap an indication Putin betting Trump will lose: pundits

The rumors of what was about to become the largest prisoner exchange since the Cold War started Tuesday.

“Five prominent political prisoners got missing from their prisons in Russia. It seems a big prisoner swap is in the making with the West and/or Ukraine,” wrote former BBC and Wall Street Journal reporter Alexander Kolyandr, now a a non-resident senior scholar at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). “If so, #EvanGershkovich might be free very soon.”

Evan Gershkovich is the Wall Street Journal reporter wrongfully arrested in Russia in March of 2023 on false charges of spying, sentenced two weeks ago to 16 years in prison, but released Thursday as part of the historic prisoner swap with several foreign countries personally negotiated at times by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Vice President Harris “played a role in negotiations with allies to secure the prisoner-swap deal,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “Harris met with both German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob separately in intimate settings during the Munich Security Conference in February to urge both leaders to push the deal through, according to a White House official.”

Twenty-six prisoners in total were released, including 16 being held by Russia and Belarus, and a total of ten from the United States, Germany, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, and Turkey. In addition to Gershkovich, among those being returned to the U.S. are Paul Whalen, Alsu Kurmasheva, and Vladimir Kara-Murza.

“We are grateful to President Biden and his administration for working with persistence and determination to bring Evan home rather than see him shipped off to a Russian work camp for a crime he didn’t commit,” Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker wrote in an open letter on the paper’s website.

Reuters describes the exchange as “a complex deal negotiated in secrecy for more than a year,” while The Wall Street Journal reported that President Joe Biden “about an hour before he notified the world he was dropping out of the presidential race on July 21—called the prime minister of Slovenia, whose country was contributing two convicted Russian spies to the swap, to secure the pardon necessary for the deal to proceed.”

WSJ aded, “CIA Director William Burns traveled to Turkey last week to meet his counterpart there and finalize the logistics for the swap,” and, “White House officials, U.S. diplomats and personnel from the CIA had crisscrossed Europe and the Middle East looking for friendly governments willing to release the Russian spies in their custody in return for Americans held by the Kremlin.”

All done in secret to ensure the deal’s success.

Back in June, Donald Trump, the ex-president running for re-election again, announced in a video on his social media website that Russian President Putin would release Gershkovich but only if Trump was re-elected.

“Evan Gershkovich, the reporter for The Wall Street Journal who is being held by Russia will be released almost immediately after the election, but definitely before I assume office,” Trump claimed. “He will be home, he’ll be safe. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia will do that for me. And I don’t believe he will do it for anyone else.”

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One month earlier, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung had said, “There is only one person who can negotiate the safe return of Mr. Gershkovich back to his family – President Trump.”

Veteran political pundits and journalists are saying Russian President Vladimir Putin is now betting that Trump will not win the White House in November, and opted to do the deal now because he wanted certain Russians back.

“Trump publicly told Putin to withhold a prisoner swap until after the election, saying it wouldn’t happen unless he was elected. Putin clearly is not listening: he’s reading the polls and realizes Trump is not going to be our next president. So he has to work with Biden,” progressive political commentator Thom Hartmann wrote.

Brookings Institution’s Norm Eisen, a CNN legal analyst, observed, “Even Putin is losing confidence in Trump after the past two weeks! —& so finalized this (long-brewing) deal with Biden-Harris.”

“Trump bloviated about how he was going to have the hostages released because of his bromance with Putin. Putin however chose to do it while Biden was in office, because he knew Trump would not have a relationship with our key allies like Germany to make a deal happen,” wrote civil rights and national security journalist Marcy Wheeler.

“Looks as if Putin has abruptly lost confidence that Trump will win in November. Locking in his hostage-taking payoff early,” remarked The Atlantic’s David Frum, a former Bush 43 speechwriter.

Talking Points Memo founder and editor-in-chief Josh Marshall agreed with Frum: “My thought too. Putin thinks his boy doesn’t have the juice.”

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