The trouble with ‘spy swaps’

Yesterday’s exchange of prisoners at Ankara airport in Turkey will have been personally ordered by President Putin. He is a veteran of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police agency, and no doubt aware of the role that swapping agents with the West has played in the troubled history of superpower rivalry. Putin knows that Russian spies look after their own – especially as the Chekists concerned are killers with blood on their hands. Vadim Krasikov, the hitman freed yesterday, was jailed in Germany in 2019 for murdering an exiled Chechen in a Berlin park.

The trouble with these ‘spy swaps’ is that they always benefit Russia more than the West. They place the same value on the lives of innocents jailed in Russia, like the Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich, as Moscow’s trained professional spies and killers such as Krasikov.