24 prisoners. 6 countries. The largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War brings WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich home.

From The Wall Street Journal. Russia freed wrongly convicted Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich as part of the largest and most complex East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War, in which he and more than a dozen others jailed by the Kremlin were exchanged for Russians held in the U.S. and Europe, including a convicted murderer.

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Gershkovich and other Americans left Russian aircraft at roughly 11:20 a.m. ET at an airport in Turkey’s capital, Ankara. Gershkovich was then transported to an aircraft lounge on a Turkish bus. Russia had kept the 32-year-old behind bars for more than a year on a false allegation of espionage. It sentenced him in a hurried and secret three-day trial to 16 years in a high-security penal colony.

Moscow also released former Marine Paul Whelan, journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a British-Russian dissident and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, sentenced to 25 years in prison on treason-related charges. Russia also released a number of political dissidents.

The sweeping deal involved 24 prisoners and at least six countries, and came together after months of negotiations at the highest levels of governments in the U.S., Russia and Germany, whose prisoner, Russian hit man Vadim Krasikov, emerged as the linchpin to the arrangement. . . . a convicted murderer that Russian President Vladimir Putin had been pushing to free since 2021. The former intelligence officer, a veteran of the Soviet-Afghan war, had shot and killed a rebel leader in a Berlin park, and was serving a life sentence.

The exchange is emblematic of a new era of state-sponsored hostage-taking by autocratic governments seeking leverage over rivals. It was negotiated as tensions soared between Russia and the West over the war in Ukraine.

It also offers sobering evidence of the asymmetry between the U.S. and Russia in this new, piratical order. Putin can order foreigners plucked from restaurants and hotels and given lengthy prison sentences on spurious charges—something an American leader can’t do. . . .

The Biden administration has pursued a series of large prisoner swaps with hostile countries, including last year extracting 10 Americans and a fugitive from Venezuela and a major deal with Iran in which the U.S. released billions of dollars in frozen revenue. Critics have questioned whether such deals encourage the arrest of more Americans. . . .

The State Department classifies a number of countries, including Russia and North Korea, as posing such a serious risk of detention that it discourages Americans from visiting. Privately, U.S. officials call them “abductor states” and fear their number will grow unless there are new measures to deter them. . . .