U.S.-Russia prisoner exchange includes Vadim Krasikov, Russian assassin serving a life sentence in Germany

The Biden administration has announced a prisoner exchange with Russia to secure the release of three American citizens, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, Marine veteran Paul Whelan and Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, as part of a complex 24-person prisoner swap.

Whelan and Gershkovich were sentenced to lengthy prison sentences in Russia on espionage charges that were consistently rejected by their families and the U.S. government as baseless. Kurmasheva, an American-Russian dual national, was convicted of spreading false information about the Russian army and sentenced to six and a half years in prison. Her husband told CBS News he believed she was arrested over a book featuring stories of everyday people who oppose Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, on which she was listed as an editor.

The highest profile Russian national being released under the highly complex, multi-nation prisoner exchange is a convicted Russian assassin who’s spent the last several years serving the a life sentence in Germany.

Who is Vadim Krasikov?

Russian President Vladimir Putin had suggested for months that he was open to releasing American prisoners in exchange for Vadim Krasikov, who was handed his life sentence for a brazen 2019 murder in Berlin that German judges called an assassination carried out at the behest of the Russian government. Krasikov was said to have been working for Russia’s domestic spy service, the FSB.

Krasikov was convicted in 2021 of killing a Georgian citizen of Chechen descent in Berlin, Zelimkhan “Tornike” Khangoshvili, who was a Chechen rebel involved in the long battle against Russian forces in Chechnya.

The judges who sentenced Krasikov called Khangoshvili’s murder an act of Russian “state terrorism,” and the incident set off a diplomatic row between Moscow and Berlin.

Krasikov’s name came up about two years ago, when a U.S. official told CBS News that Moscow had sought a deal to swap him for Whelan, the U.S. Marine veteran who was at the time the highest-profile American imprisoned in Russia. Negotiations on that swap in the summer of 2022 fell apart without an agreement. CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang said Moscow had sought “a spy for a spy” swap, Whelan for Krasikov, but that Berlin had rejected the proposal.

It wasn’t immediately clear what changed the Germans’ calculus to make the swap expected on Thursday possible, but Belarus’ state-run BeITA news agency said President Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russia’s Putin, had decided to pardon a German man who was sentenced to death in the country on terrorism and other charges.

The AFP news agency said Thursday that Germany’s foreign office had confirmed in an email that Rico Krieger was pardoned in Belarus, with a spokesperson saying the “news comes as a relief.”

In an interview aired by Belarusian state TV last week, Krieger – speaking as a prisoner and possibly under duress – said Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service had told him to photograph military sites in Belarus in October and to try to detonate explosives on a train line in the country. There was an explosion on a rail line southwest of Belarus’ capital Minsk, but nobody was hurt.

He expressed regret for his alleged actions in the interview and said he hoped Lukashenko would pardon him.

Other Russian nationals are expected to be released by various nations as part of the swap deal, including a husband and wife who were sentenced by Slovenia only Wednesday on espionage charges. 

Husband and wife spies in Slovenia

Artem Viktorovich Dultsev and Anna Valerevna Dultseva pleaded guilty to spying charges Wednesday in a court in Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana. The pair were sentenced to 19 months in prison but released on time served and ordered to leave the country and not return within five years, according to The Associated Press

The two had posted as Argentine citizens to settle in Slovenia in 2017, using false identities under which Artem established an IT company, according to the AP, and Anna ran an online art gallery. They were arrested in 2022.

Local media said the couple had used Slovenia as their base from which they visited neighboring NATO and European Union nations to deliver orders and cash to fellow operatives from their superiors in Moscow.

A university lecturer in Norway

Norway’s security services charged a man working as a university lecturer with espionage activities in late 2022, saying they had uncovered the true identity of Mikhail Valeryevich Mikushin. Mikushin, in his mid-40s, had allegedly been posing as a Brazilian academic, but officials said he was really a Russian spy.

CBS News’ partner network BBC News reported in October 2022 that Norwegian media had cited security services spokesperson Thomas Blom as saying Mikushin, who had used the fake name José Assis Giammaria to get his job lecturing at a Norwegian university, was charged with gathering intelligence linked to state secrets.

The BBC cited Christo Grozev of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat as saying Mikushin was believed to have links to Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency. 

A Spanish-Russian journalist in Poland

Pavel Alekseyevich Rubtsov, who also goes by his Spanish name, Pablo Gonzalez, had worked for years as a freelance journalist, including for American and European media, when he caught the attention of authorities as he traveled in eastern Ukraine with a photographer. He was told to report to authorities in Kyiv in February 2022, not long before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of the country.

In February this year, the International Federation of Journalists said he was the only journalist jailed in the European Union and, along with the Reporters Without Borders organization, called for his release and accused Polish authorities of failing to present any evidence against him.

The month after his arrest, Voice of America asked Poland’s Internal Security Agency about Rubtsov’s detention and was told in a statement that he had been identified as a GRU agent.

“He carried out activities for Russia using his journalistic status. As a result, he was able to move freely around Europe and the world, including zones affected by armed conflicts and areas of political tension,” the agency was quoted as saying by VOA, adding that he had gathered information that, if used by Russia, “could have a direct negative impact on the internal and external security and defense of our country.”

2 cybercriminals in the United States

Roman Seleznev is the son of a Russian parliamentarian who was sentenced by a U.S. court in December 2017 to 27 years in prison on cyber-fraud charges.

A federal jury convicted Seleznev the previous year of hacking U.S. business networks to steal credit card information, in addition to ring-leading an international cyber-theft scheme. He was convicted on 38 charges, including computer hacking and wire fraud. Authorities said he targeted restaurants and other businesses in Washington state, stealing credit card numbers to sell on internet forums. Prosecutors said his actions resulted in almost $170 million in credit card losses globally, making him “one of the most prolific credit card traffickers in history.”

Kremlin-linked Russian millionaire Vladislav Klyushin was convicted last year of participating in a $90 million insider trading scheme using secret earnings information about companies, including Microsoft, stolen from computer networks in the U.S.

According to The Associated Press, Klushin ran a Moscow-based information technology company with ties to the Russian government. 

“For nearly three years, he and his co-conspirators repeatedly hacked into U.S. computer networks to obtain tomorrow’s headlines today,” Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins said in a statement when he was convicted in February 2023. 

An alleged military equipment smuggler in the U.S.

U.S. prosecutors announced charges in 2022 against seven individuals, including Russian national Vadim Konoshchenok, accusing them of a coordinated effort to evade U.S. export laws to smuggle American-made military-grade equipment into Russia. 

According to the indictment unsealed in the Eastern District of New York, from 2017 until at least the spring of 2022, Konoshchenok, Yevgeniy Grinin, Aleksey Ippolitov, Boris Livshits, Svetlana Skvortsova, Vadim Yermolenko and Alexey Brayman used shell companies, fake addresses and counterfeit shipping labels to transport the equipment to Russia. 

They were accused of smuggling items including “advanced electronics and sophisticated testing equipment” for use in nuclear weapons development and other military and space-based applications. Investigators said the items were repackaged and shipped from various “intermediate locations” after they reached Europe and Asia, before ultimately being sent to Russia.

The prosecutors said that, as recently as October 2022, Konoshchenok, a suspected Russian intelligence officer, had been stopped by police in Estonia at the country’s border with Russia, allegedly in possession of 35 types of semiconductors, thousands of 6.5mm bullets made in Nebraska and ammunition for sniper riffles.

CBS News’ Robert Legare contributed to this report.