TASS FACTBOX. On February 12, 2025, Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced that in exchange for the release of US national M...
TASS FACTBOX. On February 12, 2025, Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced that in exchange for the release of US national Marc Fogel, who had been convicted and sentenced in Russia for drug smuggling, Russian national Alexander Vinnik was also released. Vinnik, accused of laundering between $4 billion and $9 billion through the now-defunct online cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e, has been transferred from Santa Rita prison to Russia, according to his French lawyer, Frederic Belo, who spoke to TASS. In light of this development, the TASS FACTBOX editors have reviewed the history of prisoner exchanges between the Soviet Union/Russia and the United States, to compile the following factsheet.
The first high-profile exchange took place on February 10, 1962, when Soviet intelligence officer William Fischer (better known as Rudolf Abel), arrested in New York on June 21, 1957, was exchanged for US air pilot Francis Powers, whose spy plane was shot down over the Urals on May 1, 1960. The exchange took place on the border between West Berlin and the German Democratic Republic on the Glienicker-Bruecke bridge, which later became known as the Bridge of Spies. Two more Americans were released as part of the deal: student Frederic Pryor, arrested in the GDR in August 1961 on charges of illegal entry, and tourist Marvin Makinen, arrested in Kiev in July 1961 on suspicion of espionage.
On October 11, 1963, American priest Walter Ciszek, who was arrested in 1941 on charges of espionage and subsequently spent 15 years toiling away at a labor camp in Norilsk, where he was residing without the right to leave when he was exchanged for two Soviet intelligence officers - former UN secretariat staffer Ivan Yegorov and his wife Alexandra, arrested in the United States in July of the same year.
On April 27, 1979, the Soviet authorities released from prison and sent to the United States five dissidents - Eduard Kuznetsov, Mark Dymshyts, Alexander Ginzburg, Valentin Moroz, and Georgy Vins - in exchange for two Soviet intelligence agents, Valdik Enger and Rudolf Chernyaev, who were acting undercover as UN secretariat employees. They were detained in May 1978 and sentenced to 50 years in prison each.
On June 12, 1985, 23 Americans arrested and convicted on charges of espionage in Eastern Bloc countries were exchanged for four Soviet agents at the Glienicker Bruecke, a bridge in Western Berlin.
On February 11, 1986, an exchange involving nine people took place on the same bridge. By agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States, dissident Natan Shcharansky and two citizens of Germany and Czechoslovakia who worked for American intelligence were released from the Soviet Union in exchange for Czechoslovakian intelligence officers Karl and Hanna Koecher, Soviet intelligence officer Yevgeny Zemlyakov, Pole Jerzy Kaczmarek and German Detlef Scharfenort, who were arrested in New York.
On September 28 - October 5, 1986, in exchange for Gennady Zakharov, an employee of the Soviet Mission to the United Nations arrested in the United States on August 22 of the same year, Nicholas Daniloff, the head of the Moscow bureau of US News and World Report, arrested on suspicion of espionage, and Yury Orlov, a Soviet physicist and human rights activist, a member of the dissident movement, and founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, were handed over to the US side.
On July 9, 2010, ten people who were arrested on June 27 on charges of spying for Russia were deported from the United States to Russia. They are Vladimir and Lidia Guryev, Mikhail Kutsik and Natalia Pereverzeva, Andrey Bezrukov and Yelena Vavilova, Mikhail Vasenkov, Vicky Pelaez, Anna Chapman and Mikhail Semenko. They were exchanged for Russian citizens serving sentences for spying for Western intelligence services - Gennady Vasilenko (convicted in 2006), Alexander Zaporozhsky (2003), Sergey Skripal (2006) and Igor Sutyagin (2004).
On April 27, 2022, Konstantin Yaroshenko, convicted in the United States in 2011 and sentenced to 20 years in prison on charges of organizing an international cocaine smuggling ring, was exchanged in Istanbul (Turkey) for former Marine Trevor Reed, sentenced in 2020 to nine years in a general security colony for attacking police officers in Moscow.
On December 8, 2022, Russia and the United States exchanged Russian businessman Viktor Bout for American basketball player Brittney Griner at Abu Dhabi airport (UAE). Bout was arrested in Bangkok, Thailand, at the request of the United States, and extradited to the US in 2010. In April 2012, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison on charges of supplying weapons to terrorist groups. Greiner was sentenced in August 2022 to nine years in a standard security penitentiary for drug smuggling.
On August 1, 2024, Russia and the West carried out a prisoner exchange (24 people and two children), the largest since the Cold War. Eight Russian citizens (along with two children - ten people total) who were imprisoned there, including for espionage, were returned to Russia from the United States, Germany, Norway, Poland, and Slovenia. Among them were Vadim Konoshchenok, who was awaiting trial in the United States, husband and wife Artem and Anna Dultsev, who were serving their sentences in Slovenia, and Mikhail Mikushin, who was in pre-trial detention in Norway. Russia released 15 people, including those convicted of espionage and treason. They include Americans Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich (espionage), green card holder Vladimir Kara-Murza (state treason; recognized as a foreign agent), and Alsu Kurmasheva, an editor of Radio Liberty, a radio station recognized as a foreign agent in Russia for spreading false information about the Russian armed forces). Another participant in the exchange was German citizen Rico Krieger, who was sentenced to death in Belarus and pardoned by President Alexander Lukashenko.
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