by Kit Klarenberg at The GrayZone
Western media focused intently on a Russian “murderer” released in the exchange with Washington, but whitewashed the record of his target – a Chechen militant now confirmed as a CIA asset.
August 1 saw the largest prisoner exchange between Moscow and Washington since the end of the Cold War. Among those freed were Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former US marine Paul Whelan, who were each serving 16 year sentences for espionage.
In the other direction, Russian opposition activists jailed for criticism of the so-called “special military operation” have now resettled in Western countries. This includes politician Ilya Yashin, sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in December 2022. At a press conference in Bonn, Germany on August 2, he described the feeling of being beside “the wonderful Rhine river”, when just a week earlier he was imprisoned in Siberia, as “really surreal.” But Yashin claimed that his release was difficult to personally accept, “because a murderer was free.”
He referred here to Vadim Krasikov, a Russian convicted of killing the Georgian-born Chechen militant Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin in August 2019, who was also released as part of the deal. He was reportedly of extremely high value to the Kremlin. In a February 2024 interview with US journalist Tucker Carlson, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed trading Gershkovich for an unnamed Russian “patriot” imprisoned in a “US-allied country” for “liquidating a bandit.”
Krasikov was that “patriot”, and Khangoshvili that “bandit.” In 2004, Khangoshvili led a lethal guerilla operation that killed four Russian soldiers. Krasikov was tasked by the Russian state with serving the Chechen justice, cutting him down in broad daylight in Berlin in 2019.
While the Russian operative has been subject of intense mainstream interest since the swap,…
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