President Biden cast the release of several detained Americans in a multicountry prisoner swap as a vindication of his effort to cultivate international alliances, rebuking his predecessor’s isolationist impulses while celebrating a long-sought foreign policy achievement.
“The deal that made this possible was a feat of diplomacy — and friendship,” Biden said Thursday as he announced that three American citizens and one green-card holder had been released from Russian prisons. “For anyone who questions whether allies matter, they do. They matter. And today is a powerful example of why it’s vital to have friends in this world — friends you can trust, work with and depend upon.”
The line was a thinly veiled jab at Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has often criticized allies while pushing an “America first” agenda.
Asked directly what he would say to Trump, who has previously attacked Biden over Americans held abroad, the president responded with a question of his own.
“Why didn’t he do it when he was president?” Biden said. About an hour later, Trump blasted the deal, saying it set a “bad precedent.”
The moment reflected how an intricate, seven-country prisoner exchange — coming just 96 days before Election Day and with less than six months before Biden leaves office — was quickly thrust into the nation’s fraught political landscape.
Members of Biden’s team credited Vice President Harris for helping facilitate the deal, aiming to burnish her foreign policy credentials in her presidential campaign against Trump. Lawmakers offered praise for the diplomatic push that led to the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan. Republicans were largely muted, though some questioned the wisdom of releasing Russian criminals for unjustly detained Americans.
Trump took to his social media site to suggest that U.S. negotiators had gotten the short end of the bargain, without expressing any gladness that the captives returned home safely.
“How many people do we get versus them? Are we also paying them cash? Are they giving us cash (Please withdraw that question, because I’m sure the answer is NO)?” Trump wrote on Truth Social about the deal with Russia. “Are we releasing murderers, killers, or thugs?”
Trump falsely claimed he freed hostages with “never any cash.” In 2017, Trump authorized a $2 million payment to North Korea to bring home American college student Otto Warmbier, two people familiar with the incident told The Post. It’s unclear whether the money was ever paid. Warmbier, a 22-year-old University of Virginia student imprisoned in North Korea after being accused of pulling down a propaganda poster, was comatose when he left the country and died shortly after arriving in the United States.
Speaking to reporters at the White House, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that no money was exchanged in Thursday’s exchange.
He also praised the president for building the international relationships that helped facilitate the agreement, saying it “honestly could only be achieved by a leader like Joe Biden.”
For an 81-year-old president who was nudged out of his reelection bid by members of his own party concerned about his ability to carry out his duties in a second term, the swap amounted to the first major foreign policy achievement during a period in which he is aiming to bolster his legacy before leaving office.
As part of the deal, Russia agreed to release 16 prisoners: four Americans, five Germans and seven Russians, including pro-democracy dissidents. A convicted Russian assassin was released from Germany, and several Russian intelligence operatives held in the United States and Europe were also set free in the largest international prisoner exchange since the Cold War.
“It’s an important part of Biden’s legacy building phase in the lame duck period, the kind of success that has become part of the history books,” said Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University. “And what’s good for Biden is good for Vice President Harris.”
The release of detained Americans undercuts one of Trump’s frequent lines of attack against Biden’s handling of foreign affairs. Trump has argued that only he would be able to free U.S. citizens imprisoned abroad.
“The entire world, I tell you this: We want our hostages back, and they better be back before I assume office, or you will be paying a very big price,” Trump said in his presidential nominee acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in July.
For the first year of Gershkovich’s detention, Trump remained conspicuously silent on it, part of a long-standing pattern of avoiding criticizing Putin. As reporters increasingly asked Trump about Gershkovich, he began claiming he would secure the reporter’s release after being elected before taking office. Trump did not explain how he would accomplish that but vaguely referenced a special personal dynamic with Putin.
“Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, will do that for me, and I don’t believe he’ll do it for anyone else,” Trump said.
As for Whelan, who was first arrested in Russia during Trump’s term, Trump claimed in 2022 that he turned out down a deal as president to free the former Marine in exchange for a Russian arms dealer nicknamed “the Merchant of Death.” The United States released the arms dealer, Viktor Bout, in 2022 in exchange for basketball star Brittney Griner. Trump called that deal “crazy and bad.”
In a statement, Whelan’s family criticized the Trump administration’s early response to Paul Whelan’s imprisonment.
“Early on, we were discouraged from speaking out about Paul’s case,” they wrote. “… Those first years were hard when the Trump Administration ignored Paul’s wrongful detention, and it was media attention that helped to finally create critical mass and awareness within the U.S. government.”
The family also praised Trump’s ambassador to Russia, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, for advocating on Whelan’s behalf in 2019.
Harris plans to join Biden to welcome Whelan and the other released Americans at Joint Base Andrews on Thursday night.
Harris was in Houston to attend the funeral of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) when the deal was announced but celebrated it on social media, writing on X that she would continue working “until every American who is wrongfully detained or held hostage is brought home.” She echoed those comments in brief remarks to reporters before returning to Washington.
Biden administration officials touted Harris’s role in the negotiations as pivotal. She helped advance the talks during a high-level meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the Munich Security Conference in February, Sullivan said.
“She was a participant in, very much a core member of, the team that helped make this happen,” he said.
Harris used the opportunity at the security conference to discuss the release of Vadim Krasikov, a Russian citizen serving a life sentence in Germany for the 2019 killing of a former Chechen rebel commander in Berlin, a senior administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the leaders’ private conversation.
“It became clear to us early on that to secure the release of the Americans, a critical part would be the release of Krasikov, so the vice president spoke directly to Scholz about the need to get this done,” the official said.
Harris on Thursday spoke with Yulia Navalnaya, who welcomed the release of three allies of her late husband Alexei Navalny, the political opposition leader who died suddenly in a remote Arctic prison in February.
Biden and Harris have used high-profile appearances to champion the cause of unjustly detained Americans in the past. Biden mentioned Gershkovich and Whalen during his State of the Union address in March and his speech at the White House correspondents’ dinner in April. Speaking to reporters last week, Harris mentioned the names of several Americans who were taken captive to Gaza by Hamas terrorists in October.
John Hudson contributed to this report.
