Human Shields

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The return of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former US Marine Paul Whelan and other foreign prisoners in Russian custody in the biggest prisoner swap since the Cold War ended the latest round of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s so-called “hostage diplomacy.”

Defined in World Politics Review as “the arbitrary detention of foreigners in order to gain diplomatic leverage,” hostage diplomacy – which dates to ancient times – is these days arguably the natural consequence of autocratic regimes like those in Russia, China and Iran, whose leaders will leverage every possible manner of exerting control both abroad and at home.

As M. Gessen wrote in the New York Times in a story describing the history and insider negotiations that produced the swap, the Russian judicial system is designed to take hostages that might prove valuable to the Russian state in the future. Russian law makes people into bargaining chips. The Palestinian terror group Hamas has employed the tactic, too, of course, kidnapping Israelis on Oct. 7 to complicate the response.

Under the terms of the swap – one of the biggest in history – Russia freed 16 Americans, Germans and Russians in exchange for eight Russians in the United States, Germany, and other countries, the Washington Post reported.

Besides Gershkovich and Whelan, the prisoners freed from Russia include Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, who broke rules about writing about the Russian military, Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, and opposition movement leader Ilya Yashin, the BBC wrote.

After her release, Kurmasheva told CNN that she felt like she was “finally being treated as a human being … I’ve been waking up from that nightmare.” But Yashin was critical of the swap, noted Politico. He did not want to leave Russia. His liberation was a way for Putin to exile him from the country. Germany has agreed never to send Yashin back to his homeland.

“What happened on Aug. 1 I don’t view as a prisoner swap … but as my illegal expulsion from Russia against my will, and I say sincerely, more than anything I want now to go back home,” Yashin said in an emotional press conference in the German city of Bonn, Reuters reported.

Controversially, one of the freed Russians in Western custody was a spy who assassinated a Georgian, who had been fighting Russian troops in Chechnya, in a Berlin park in the middle of the day, added the Associated Press. As a result, the Las Vegas Review-Journal described the deal as “bittersweet.”

As both sides played up the victory, some believe the real losers are those in democracies, even when they get their citizens back.

That’s because the playing field is skewed, and democracies are particularly vulnerable, wrote the Wall Street Journal, calling it an asymmetric advantage for authoritarian states that currently hold hundreds of US and European citizens – for political reasons, and political leverage. “Countries with rule of law and independent judiciaries cannot just order tit-for-tat reprisals, grabbing similar hostages in return. They’re also constrained in what they can do to ban (the) travel of their own citizens to adversary nations.”