Alongside the celebration and relief, the exchange raised the debate of whether this would encourage foreign adversaries to detain Americans as leverage.
Two dozen prisoners from seven countries were freed in a historic swap on Thursday, including several wrongfully detained American citizens held in Russia.
President Joe Biden called the deal, the largest of its kind since the Cold War, “a feat of diplomacy and friendship.”
Among those released were two wrongfully detained American citizens held by Moscow — Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan — as well as Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist, and Vladimir Kara-Muza, a legal permanent resident of the U.S.
Alongside the celebration and relief of the prisoners returning home, the exchange of innocent Americans for Russian criminals raised the debate of whether this would encourage foreign adversaries to target and wrongfully detain Americans to use as leverage.
“It’s a plausible critique”, ABC News contributor Elizabeth Neumann, a former Homeland Security official, said. “Are we actually feeding the beast by doing this prisoner swap, making it more likely that they are going to actually go and unlawfully detain more people so that they have bargaining chips so that we will in the future release whoever we might arrest that is important to Putin?”
Thomas Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the message the prisoner swap sends to others “is something that any White House official or government official would ask.”
“You do the best you can to try to limit the possibility of creating incentives to seize other Americans instead”, he said.
In a joint statement Thursday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called the release “encouraging news” but said they “recognize that trading hardened Russian criminals for innocent Americans does little to discourage Putin’s reprehensible behavior.”
“Without serious action to deter further hostage-taking by Russia, Iran, and other states hostile to the United States, the costs of hostage diplomacy will continue to rise”, they said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s modus operandi is to round up Americans on false charges to then get his “henchmen” who are imprisoned abroad back, Neumann said.
