Friday Briefing: Evan Gershkovich Freed in a Prisoner Swap

A sweeping prisoner swap yesterday involving seven countries freed the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and two other Americans who were being held in Russia, along with several Russian opposition figures.

It was the most far-reaching exchange between Russia and the West in decades. Here’s the latest.

Western governments released eight people, including Vadim Krasikov, who had been sentenced to life in prison in Germany for assassinating a Chechen former fighter in Berlin.

Russia released 16 prisoners, including Oleg Orlov, a co-chairman of the human rights group Memorial; Vladimir Kara-Murza, who won the Pulitzer Prize this year for columns he had written for The Washington Post from his prison cell; and Ilya Yashin, a well-known opposition leader who was also behind bars. These are the 24 prisoners — from the U.S., Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway and Russia — who were released in the swap.

The linchpin of the deal for Russia was Krasikov’s release, which President Vladimir Putin had long sought. I asked my colleague Neil MacFarquhar, who has covered the Kremlin for years, why Putin wanted him back so much.

“Russia passed a law in 2006 which formally permitted the extrajudicial killing abroad of those Moscow accuses of extremism and terrorism,” Neil told me. “So in the eyes of the Kremlin, Krasikov’s assassination in Berlin of a Chechen separatist leader whom Russia labeled a terrorist was legitimate.”

“In addition, Krasikov was an agent of the F.S.B. — the successor agency of the K.G.B., where Putin spent the bulk of his career — so there was an element of rescuing one of his own,” he added.