By Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw, Bojan Pancevski and Aruna Viswanatha, Illustrations by Alexandra Citrin-Safadi/WSJ
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 her 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 in handcuffs and a bulletproof helmet 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.
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