US releases Russian hackers and spies as part of prisoner swap

Editor’s Note: Story updated 3 p.m. Eastern U.S. time with details of the swap.

The United States and other countries released hackers, spies and an assassin Thursday as part of a historic prisoner exchange with Russia.

The U.S., Germany and Slovenia swapped prisoners with Russia and Belarus at an airport in Ankara, Turkey, local media reported, citing Turkey's national intelligence agency.

The White House said in a statement that the U.S. negotiated the release of 16 people from Russia, including five Germans as well as seven Russian citizens who were political prisoners in their own country. The prisoners released by Russia include Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, Marine veteran Paul Whelan and Russian-American radio journalist Alsu Kurmasheva.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) told local media that Moscow received eight citizens but didn’t specify their names. According to media reports, the list of Russian nationals released from the West includes hackers Roman Seleznev and Vladislav Klyushin; four spies; convicted assassin Vadim Krasikov; and a Russian intelligence operative suspected of smuggling U.S.-made electronics and ammunition to Russia.

Klyushin was sentenced in 2023 to nine years in prison in the U.S. for his role in a $93 million stock market cheating scheme that relied on secret corporate information stolen through the hacking of U.S. computer networks. 

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) called Klyushin “a sophisticated hacker.” In Russia, he owned a Moscow-based information technology company M-13. According to DOJ, the company offered services “that seek exploitable vulnerabilities in a computer system via hacking techniques, purportedly for defensive purposes.”

Seleznev, also known by the aliases Track2, Bulba and Ncux 3, was sentenced to 27 years in prison in 2017 for stealing and selling millions of credit card numbers and causing more than $169 million in damage to small businesses and financial institutions, including those in the U.S.

According to court documents, Seleznev hacked into retail point-of-sale systems and installed malicious software that allowed him to steal millions of credit card numbers from more than 500 U.S. businesses and send the data to servers that he controlled in Russia, Ukraine and Virginia.

Alleged Russian spies swapped during the prisoner exchange include Artem and Anna Dultsev, who were living undercover in Slovenia. Another Russian citizen, Mikhail Mikushin, was arrested in Norway in 2022. He was working at a university, pretending to be a Brazilian researcher. A Russian spy, Pavel Rubtsov, was living in Poland pretending to be a Spanish journalist. He was arrested in February 2022.