Don't get me wrong: It's good that Russian civil rights activists Vladimir Kara-Murza and Oleg Orlov are free again. It is also correct that the American journalists Alsou Kurmasheva and Evan Gershkovich escaped from the humiliating conditions of the Russian penal system. It is reassuring that the German adventurer Rico K., who with his naivety earned himself a death sentence from a regime as unceremonious as that in Minsk, is a free man again. Sixteen people can now breathe a sigh of relief because they have avoided injustice. The Russian state persecuted them for exercising their rights as citizens or simply doing their jobs. The regime has criminalized people in order to use them as bargaining chips for those to be ransomed from Western prisons.
Humanity is above state affairs. In this case, and with the current world situation, that was probably perfectly fine. After all, the very fact that warring parties have been negotiating with each other for months raises further hopes. Rightly or wrongly – we will hardly ever know that. Just as it is impossible to understand the reasoning behind Russia's decision to release political prisoners it had previously frantically pursued. Whether the exchange should be interpreted as a sign of Putin's strength or weakness, we can only speculate. But one thing is certain: the ruler in the Kremlin is taking advantage of the "homecoming" of its agents for propaganda purposes.
Exchange - a legal disaster
And this is where the news about the prisoner swap starts to get really hot. Among the Russians released from Western prisons is Vadim Krasikov, a convicted murderer. According to the verdict against him, he executed a former Chechen field commander in the middle of Berlin's Tiergarten park on behalf of the Russian state. A hitman who showed no signs of remorse before the court was traded for a chorus of people persecuted for political reasons. Criminally unproven, completely innocent people against a state terrorist whom Putin welcomed with a hug in Moscow. It's not just the victims' lawyers who think this is unacceptable.
Putin wanted to get Krasikov back, as the Russian president had repeatedly hinted before. Now he got it – moreover, even before Krasikov began serving his sentence for a "particularly serious crime" according to the German understanding of the law. For anyone interested in law, this is a disaster.
Bad political signal
This prisoner swap by Ankara is now being compared to the spectacular exchanges of the Cold War. Many think of the iconic photos of the Glinike Bridge that connected West Berlin and Potsdam in the GDR; on this bridge East and West, the CIA and the KGB exchanged their spies. Agent against agent - that was the basic rule. But it no longer applies in the new Cold War of our time.
This exchange is also a bad political signal: Terror goes unpunished as long as the country ordering it takes enough hostages from the other side. The West, on the other hand, is vulnerable to blackmail. This can have a fatal motivating effect on the secret services of autocratic states. It also gives the Putin regime a legitimizing impetus for its aggressive anti-Western posture and its contempt for the rule of law. Viewed in this light, the victory for humanity that this prisoner exchange undoubtedly represents may prove to be a pyrrhic victory.
Author: Christian Trippe