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In the end, after more than a year of negotiating with the Russians to bring home Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan and Alsu Kurmasheva, the Biden administration needed help most of all from the Germans.
But when the U.S. approached German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, senior officials like National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan weren’t clear how he’d respond.
In an interview with POLITICO Magazine, Sullivan laid out how he, his colleagues and President Joe Biden got Scholz on board despite Russia’s big ask: releasing the convicted murderer Vadim Krasikov as part of a sprawling deal to free over a dozen political prisoners, including Americans, Germans and Russians.
Krasikov, a colonel in the FSB and a close confidante of Vladimir Putin, was arrested in Germany in 2019 for his killing of a Chechen dissident and Scholz was initially unconvinced about the benefit of freeing Krasikov.
Sullivan was one of many key figures involved in the prisoner swap, but the White House has called him a leader of the effort, and he acknowledged how meaningful getting this deal done was for the Biden administration, and for him.
“I’m pretty overwhelmed,” he said.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
This deal seemed like it hinged a lot on discussions with the Germans — getting them to agree to let Krasikov go. Can you describe what that journey was like?
Well, the central ingredient in getting a “yes” from Germany was President Biden’s relationship with Chancellor Scholz. They developed a relationship with trust, and the president was able to make the request as being not just in the U.S. national security interest, but in our broader collective interest, because it involved bringing home yes Americans, but also prominent Russian political prisoners.
The pathway to getting to that yes ran mainly through the dialog that I sustained with my counterpart, the German national security adviser, Jens Ploetner, and he and I talked through the formulas that would be acceptable for the German government and that we thought would be acceptable to the Russian government. And we traded lists and talked through strategy.
What do you think the resistance was about?
I’ve been there. President Biden has been there. Secretary [Antony] Blinken has been there. We’ve had to face very difficult decisions with the release of bad guys from U.S. custody in order to achieve an outcome that we were looking for. So you never reach these decisions lightly, and you never reach them in lightning speed either.
You have to make sure that what you are getting in return for releasing someone is that you can look in the eyes of your people and in the eyes of the world and say this was worth doing, and that takes time, and it takes consideration. That was definitely true in this case with Germany.
We’re told the Germans wanted Alexei Navalny as part of the original deal. Is that right? And was that deal, with Navalny in it, ever presented to the Russians before he died in February 2024?
So our conversations with the Germans very much included Alexei Navalny as part of a package that would come out in return for Krasikov, plus all the other people we would send back to Russia. It was a central feature of the discussions that I was having with Jens, that Tony was having with his counterpart, that the president was having with Scholz. And then Alexei Navalny tragically died, and we had to think about an alternative way to get to the result that we saw this week. We did not get the opportunity to present the Navalny proposal to the Russians, before he died.
Was it your idea to expand the deal — to make it bigger? Did it give the U.S. more wiggle room to add additional Americans to the roster?
I never like to directly answer the question about whose idea something is because…
I am sure it was an interagency effort.
Exactly.
So, how did the idea come to fruition?
Two factors. The first factor, the Russians were insisting on Krasikov, and we wanted to test the alternative to Krasikov. Was there some other way to get to the deal? And that led us to look for other Russian intelligence agents around the world who could potentially be put in play in a trade, to see if that would work in lieu of Krasikov.
Second factor, we knew that for there to be any chance for Germany to put Krasikov on the table, it would have to be more than just the Americans coming out and Germans coming out. It would also have to involve a significant release, something that would justify and be worthy of the return of Krasikov to Russia. So, we began looking at Navalny and other political prisoners and dissidents in Russia. A number of these other assets, and those offers hit a brick wall. We developed the concept that we would combine the Krasikov offer with these additional assets with some Russians in custody for the larger package that was ultimately put forward.
It was an iterative process. This was not just a group of us sitting in a room dreaming it up on a piece of paper and then handing it over to the Russians.
When was the deal that got these people out finalized? Can you describe those final hours and what the hitch was in Slovenia that needed to be worked out?
Well, it’s one thing to actually get an agreement in principle and the whole other thing to actually execute that agreement. In this case, it involved the diplomats, the intelligence agencies, the president’s and prime minister’s offices, and critically, it involved the justice systems of multiple countries. And so a big piece of what we had to achieve was synchronizing and aligning decisions by judges and justice systems for several different individuals who were at various states within those justice systems.
I had to be thinking every single day, do we have all of the pieces in place? And one by one, they were falling into place. And then it became clear that Slovenia was on board with doing it. But they had a hitch that didn’t enable them to actually put the cases forward for several weeks, well beyond August. So on Saturday, July 20, I called my counterpart, the Slovenian national security adviser, and basically said, “We have all the other pieces in place. This is a fragile deal. It could fall apart at any time. Time is not our friend. We need to move. And so anything you could possibly do to facilitate that would be very much welcome.”
And my counterpart said he would try to lean forward. And ultimately we agreed the best way to ultimately get it done was to have the president directly engage with the prime minister, which he did the following day. The prime minister was able to give a positive response to the president on that call. And that’s when we knew that, at least in theory, the pieces were in place. And then in practice, we had to hold our breath for 11 days.
And this was all happening when you were at the Aspen Security Conference in Colorado?
Yeah. I made the call to my counterpart from my room at Aspen.
What was yesterday like for you? Out of all the things you’ve had to work on in the Biden years, where does this sit in terms of your feeling of success or impact?
It’s actually hard to describe how meaningful it was because I felt like it was something of actual policy and strategic consequence, but combined with it being of just overriding human consequence. It was about people, individuals, and it really came home for me standing in the Oval Office when the president was talking to Vladimir Kara-Murza on the phone, and Vladimir said to him, “I thought I was going to die in a Russian prison.”
And it struck me that there are larger things that come out of this, in terms of our alliance, in terms of our values, and living them out.
I got a little emotional at the podium and then tried to strike it from the record. So, I’m pretty overwhelmed.
