President Vladimir Putin’s past with the KGB is core to his identity as Russia’s leader. That was evident in last week’s prisoner exchange. Photo / Nanna Heitmann, The New York Times
ANALYSIS
A sprawling exchange with the West underscored the Russian president’s loyalty to his intelligence services. It also showed his continued interest in making deals.
As he sat in a Russian jail for five months, human rights champion Oleg Orlov sometimes grew wistful: what if he walked free someday as part of a deal between Russia and the West?
The chances that Russian President Vladimir Putin would make a prisoner swap like that seemed as remote as a “star twinkling far, far, far away on the horizon,” Orlov, 71, said this week. The dire state of the relationship between Moscow and the West, and their diverging interests, appeared to rule out the kind of detailed negotiation necessary for such a complicated deal.
But last week, it happened, in the most far-reaching prisoner swap with Moscow since the Cold War: Putin and his ally Belarus freed Orlov and 15 other Russians, Germans and Americans in exchange for a convicted assassin and seven other Russians released by the West. It was a moment when Orlov saw anew how core Putin’s past with the KGB, the Soviet spy agency, was to the Russian president’s identity – and to the sort of country he’s trying to shape Russia into.
The swap happened because “Putin is a KGB man, an FSB man,” Orlov said in a phone interview four days after two private jets carrying him and other released prisoners landed in Cologne, Germany. Espionage is a subject Orlov knows well, having spent decades studying the crimes of the Soviet secret police as a co-founder of the Memorial human rights group, which was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.
Putin served as a KGB agent in Dresden, East Germany, in the 1980s and ran the FSB, its domestic intelligence successor agency, in the 1990s. To the Russian leader, Orlov said, showing loyalty to the FSB and other Russian intelligence services by winning their agents’ freedom trumped the political risk of releasing opposition figures whom the Kremlin had branded as traitors.
Thursday’s seven-country exchange – and the heroes’ welcome the returning Russians received in Moscow, including a red-carpet greeting from Putin – exemplified the security-focused state that Putin has built. It also highlighted the deal-making side of his leadership style, a characteristic that appears to have remained intact despite the heightened tensions with the West from the war in Ukraine.
The top story on one of Russian state television’s prime time newscasts Monday showed how central the KGB’s legacy has become to the Kremlin’s messaging about patriotism and national identity. It was an exclusive interview with two of last week’s released spies: a couple dispatched to Slovenia by another of the Soviet spy agency’s modern-day successors, the SVR foreign intelligence service.
Anna Dultseva and Artem Dultsev impersonated an Argentine couple so thoroughly in Slovenia that they spoke Spanish to their children at home. In the interview, Dultsev described in halting Russian – he had barely spoken the language in his years undercover – how a fellow SVR agent visited him in a Slovenian jail and passed along greetings from Putin.
“He said that Vladimir Vladimirovich and the SVR are doing everything possible for our release,” Dultsev recalled, referring to the Russian president formally by his patronymic.
Spies like the Dultsevs “give their whole life to serving the motherland and make sacrifices that a normal person wouldn’t understand,” the state television reporter said. “For instance, they raised their kids as Spanish-speaking Catholics. Now they’ll have to learn about borscht and our New Year.”
Dmitry S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, claimed that the Dultsevs’ son and daughter learned only on the plane to Moscow after Thursday’s swap that they were Russian. He also confirmed that Vadim Krasikov, who was convicted of killing a Chechen separatist fighter in a Berlin park in 2019 and released last week, was an employee of the FSB domestic intelligence agency with personal links to Putin.
But beyond celebrating the purported patriotism and sacrifice made by Russia’s agents, there has been another element to the Kremlin’s messaging since Thursday: good spycraft also means making deals with your adversary. Of course, in Putin’s Russia, such deals can be based on what many in the West see as tantamount to hostage-taking of people like Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter released as part of last week’s deal.
“This was a very tough chess game, played according to the best textbooks, lasting a tediously long time,” Dmitry A. Medvedev, the deputy head of Putin’s security council and one of the most hawkish members of his retinue, wrote after the swap.
Western officials involved in the negotiations said the Kremlin insisted on running the talks not through diplomatic channels but between spy agencies. The CIA led the negotiations for the United States, and Western officials say Putin largely relied on the FSB, the agency he appears to trust most, even though its domestic intelligence role makes it more of a counterpart to the FBI.
And while Western officials have described encounters with Russian diplomats in recent years as unproductive harangues, people involved in the secret negotiations with the FSB leading up to last week’s swap said they were focused and professional. The Kremlin sounded a similar message.
“To be fair,” Medvedev wrote, “our ‘Western friends’ also displayed the necessary pragmatism and a tendency toward reasonable compromises at a certain moment.”
The eagerness on both sides to make a deal was reflected in its timing: months before an American election and the subsequent conclusion of President Joe Biden’s term as president. A person close to the Kremlin who was involved in some of the discussions said the thinking in Moscow was to “strike while the iron is hot” and cinch a deal while there was one to be had. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorised to discuss the negotiations publicly.
Putin sees former President Donald Trump as a fickle force who is hard to negotiate with, some analysts who study the Kremlin say. And given Trump’s toxic relationship with Germany, the Kremlin may have doubted that he would be able to convince Berlin to give up Krasikov, the linchpin of the swap, Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, argued.
The interest in deal-making Putin displayed in the swap led some analysts to speculate that a similar approach of secret talks between spy agencies could also bring about a cease-fire in Ukraine. Indeed, even as their war has raged, Russia and Ukraine have repeatedly negotiated prisoner-of-war exchanges, including at least three swaps freeing 520 prisoners between May and July.
Western officials involved in the talks played down that possibility. Last week’s prisoner swap, they said, resulted from a rare overlap in interests among Washington, Berlin and Moscow. When it comes to Ukraine, they said, the two sides remain much further apart.
But people involved in the talks did not rule out future deals – at least to exchange more prisoners. Orlov, the human rights activist, said that he and other political prisoners freed last week had begun strategising about how to get more of their comrades released before they even landed in Germany.
Ilya Yashin, a prominent opposition politician whom Putin released, acknowledged in a YouTube broadcast on Sunday that engaging with Putin in prisoner exchange talks could only motivate him to take further hostile measures. But, he went on, there should be no illusions: no matter how the West behaves, Putin will not play by its rules.
“All dictators take hostages and torture them publicly, getting some advantage for themselves,” he said. “There is no way for opponents of dictators to act that would exclude this.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Anton Troianovski
Photographs by: Haiyun Jiang and Nanna Heitmann
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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