Navalny Couldn’t Be Freed Until Gershkovich Was Kidnapped

I was having lunch with Grozev when Rae was off in a European country meeting with the spy. Grozev was fretting because he hadn’t heard from her in hours. Then she called. She’d been dining with the spy. He was charming, she said, and didn’t seem like an assassin at all. “She has been Stockholm-ed,” Grozev said, referring to the fictional syndrome that supposedly makes hostages love their captors. The spy promised to take the proposed prisoner-exchange proposal to Putin. It’s not clear if he did.

At the same time, Gershkovich’s mother, Ella Milman, was mounting a campaign of her own. As her son’s colleagues at The Wall Street Journal have written , she was shuttling all over the world, finding ways to meet with top U.S. and German officials, with the goal of convincing them to broker her son’s release.

By February 2024, the White House was finally, fully behind the idea of negotiating a deal. A pre-existing channel — already used to execute the Reed and Griner transfers — “on the intelligence side of the house,” in Washington-speak, was activated. It appeared that the Kremlin had agreed to a trade that would involve Gershkovich, Navalny and several other Russian dissidents. Grozev and Pevchikh, in Munich for an annual security conference, were ecstatic. On the evening of Feb. 15, they debated whether to buy champagne or hold off until the trade had happened. Out of superstition, they decided to hold off.

Late that night, Pevchikh suddenly blurted out a terrifying question: “But what if they kill him?”

That’s silly, Grozev told her. There is a protocol, a way these things are done.

Pevchikh later told me that she had no idea why she even asked what she asked: It wasn’t a fear she was aware of experiencing. The next day, the world learned that Navalny had died in a Russian prison.

Millions of Russians lost their hope for the future. Grozev and Pevchikh lost their friend.

Maria Pevchikh speaking on behalf of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny at the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2021.Credit...Cristobal Herrera Ulashkevich/EPA, via Shutterstock

A week earlier, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin had made his first reference to a possible swap, suggesting that Gershkovich could be traded for “a person who, out of patriotic sentiments, liquidated a bandit in one of the European capitals” — meaning Krasikov. Now, Grozev and Pevchikh wondered: By making Navalny’s release a condition of the swap, had they hastened his death? And did this mean that naming any other Russian dissidents would hasten their death, too? But Navalny was in a class by himself. No one else scared Putin as much. And anyway, by now the process was out of Grozev’s and Pevchikh’s hands. The government negotiators had taken over.

In October 2023, Russia took hostage another American journalist, Alsu Kurmasheva, who worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague. Kurmasheva, who is also a Russian national, had been visiting her ailing mother. The journalist was sentenced to six and a half years for spreading false information about the Russian armed forces.

Russia was also taking German hostages, including Kevin Lik, an 18-year-old high-school student who also holds Russian citizenship and was sentenced to four years in prison for high treason. Late last year, Belarus, Russia’s closest ally, arrested Rico Krieger, a former employee of the German Red Cross, and sentenced him to death for what the government called terrorism. In the face of a death sentence, the moral-hazard argument could no longer hold up.

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On Thursday, a Russian plane carrying 16 people, among them Americans, Germans and Russians, landed in Ankara, Turkey. In exchange, Russia got Krasikov, along with a Russian hacker and a Russian businessman convicted of insider trading, both of whom had been serving time in the United States, and five convicted or suspected spies, released by the United States, Norway, Poland and Slovenia. Grozev’s investigative work had played a key role in identifying several of the spies.

The three Americans posed for a photo with an American flag. They looked as one would expect: happy and emaciated. A neat stack of sandwiches was waiting on what appeared to be a conference table behind them. Then they and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a journalist and political activist who had survived two assassination attempts before being sentenced to 25 years for high treason, flew to the United States.