Reporter Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan are among those being exchanged in a prisoner swap deal between the US and Russia, it has been reported.
There have been ongoing reports that a swap deal has been underway today, including movements of various planes, but the exact nature of the agreement has not yet been confirmed.
However, the Reuters news agency is reporting that Mr Gershkovich and Mr Whelan, who had been held in Russian prisons, are among those being moved. It cited the Turkish presidency.
Details of the possible exchange remain scarce but there is speculation that it could be the biggest such swap since the Cold War.
Evan Gershkovich
US journalist Gershkovich was first arrested and detained in March 2023 after Russia claimed he had been “gathering secret information” on orders from the CIA.
President Joe Biden previously said the Wall Street Journal reporter had been “targeted” and that they were “pushing hard” for his release.
Russian prosecutors alleged he had gathered secret information on the orders of the CIA about a company that manufactures tanks for Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
Mr Gershkovich, 32, said the charges against him were false and his employer called the case a sham.
He was jailed for 16 years earlier this month after being convicted of espionage in a trial widely seen as politically motivated.
Paul Whelan
A former US marine, Paul Whelan has been in custody in Russia since he was arrested in a Moscow hotel room on 28 December 2018.
Police said they caught him “red-handed” with a computer memory stick containing a list of secret Russian agents.
He was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 16 years in a maximum security prison.
Mr Whelan, who also holds British citizenship, had pleaded not guilty, claiming he was set up by a sting operation and that he had been given the USB drive by someone else, thinking it only contained holiday photos.
The then US ambassador to Russia John Sullivan described the case against Mr Whelan as a “mockery of justice”.
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While we await more information about what is happening, here are some of the other high profile people being held in Russia that have been the subject of speculation.
Vladimir Kara-Murza
Vladimir Kara-Murza. Pic: AP
A dual UK-Russian citizen, Vladimir Kara-Murza is being held in a penal colony in the Siberian city of Omsk on treason charges he says are politically motivated.
The opposition politician was jailed for 25 years on charges after making public remarks which were critical of the Kremlin.
His arrest in April 2022, weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, came as authorities ratcheted up their crackdown on dissent to levels unseen since Soviet times.
Mr Kara-Murza’s wife and lawyers have repeatedly sounded the alarm about his health deteriorating in prison.
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Vadim Ostanin
An associate of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Mr Ostanin was convicted on extremism charges in July last year.
He was sentenced to nine years in a penal colony after being found guilty of organising an extremist community and belonging to a non-profit that “infringes on citizens’ rights,” Mr Navalny’s team said at the time.
Mr Ostanin was detained in November 2021, several months after Mr Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption and his regional offices were labelled as “extremist organisations” by the Russian government.
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of a potential exchange are Russian citizens held in prisons in the West.
Vadim Krasikov
Russian hitman Vadim Krasikov is serving a life sentence in Germany for the 2019 killing of a Georgian citizen who had fought Russian troops in Chechnya and later claimed asylum in Germany.
German judges said he acted on the orders of Russian authorities, who gave him a false identity, passport and the resources to carry out the killing.
The killing and subsequent sentencing triggered a major diplomatic row between Russia and Germany, including tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions.
Russia and the West have a long history of prisoner swaps
The exchange on Thursday has been billed as the biggest since the Cold War – a time when tit-for-tat trading of captured spies, agents and innocent citizens, caught on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, was commonplace.
A well-known location for spy swaps was the Glienicke bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam in what was East Germany.
It was the site of a 1962 exchange – depicted in the move Bridge of Spies – between KGB colonel Rudolf Abel and Gary Powers, the pilot of an American spy plane that was shot down over the Soviet Union.
The collapse of the Soviet Union did not mean an end in the trade of captured spies and other citizens.
The last significant swap in the post-Cold War era was in 2010 on the tarmac of the international airport in Vienna, when 10 Russian spies, including Anna Chapman – detained by the United States – were exchanged for four people released by Russia, including Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal, an MI6 operative.
Eight years later, Mr Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent in the cathedral city of Salisbury in a botched assassination attempt carried out by Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Ankara, the Turkish capital, was chosen as the location for the latest swap.
The biggest known spy swap between the eastern bloc and western powers took place in 1985 after a three-year period of talks. It involved 25 people imprisoned in East Germany who were exchanged for four East Europeans held by the allies.
