WASHINGTON — Month after month, as American diplomats pushed for the release of Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan from Russian prisons, they received the same, infuriating answer: If you want both prisoners, we want
Vadim Krasikov as part of the deal.
Mr. Krasikov is an assassin who murdered a Chechen fighter in a park in Berlin in broad daylight in 2019, a brazen killing that the German authorities say was committed at the behest of Russia’s intelligence services. Convicted and sentenced to life in prison in Germany, Mr. Krasikov was not in U.S. custody to be traded to Russia.
It was, the Americans thought, hardly a viable request for a
swap that would include Ms. Griner, a W.N.B.A. star, and
Mr. Whelan, a former U.S. Marine, who were being detained on what Biden administration officials considered trumped-up charges. American officials felt out their German counterparts to see if they might agree and were hardly surprised when Berlin refused to release what they considered a cold killer. Trying to be creative, the Americans even explored some sort of three-way deal that would give the Germans something in return, but that did not go anywhere, either.
Privately, some of the administration’s diplomats concluded that the insistence on freeing Mr. Krasikov was a stalling tactic by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who they believed was determined not to deliver any kind of political victory to President Biden before the midterm elections in the United States last month. Others believed the Russians were serious and saw it as a face-saving way for Moscow’s security services to give up Mr. Whelan, whom they convicted of espionage despite flat denials from Washington that he was a spy.
Either way, how Mr. Biden came to agree to a swap that freed Ms. Griner but not Mr. Whelan was a tale of feints and intrigue carried out through secret negotiations and public posturing, all against the backdrop of a brutal war in which American-armed Ukrainians were battling Russian invaders. At the end of the day, according to senior U.S. officials directly involved in the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe delicate diplomacy, it left the president with the unpalatable choice of liberating one American while leaving another behind.
