Last week, eight Russians imprisoned in the West were released in exchange for eight American and German citizens and eight Russian dissidents in one of the biggest prisoner exchanges between Russia and the West since the cold war. Pictures of President Vladimir Putin hugging a convicted killer while his US counterpart Joe Biden welcomed home journalist Evan Gershkovich and other US citizens triggered discussions over how each side benefitted, and ultimately which could be considered the “winner”.

Shortly after the US president hailed the exchange as an achievement “all Americans can take pride in”, critics were quick to point out the difficult moral and political decisions it involved, not least by German negotiators, who included in the release Vadim Krasikov, a man convicted to a life-long prison sentence for the murder of a Chechen asylum seeker in Berlin. But beyond these immediate debates, the exchange has also raised several structural dilemmas that Western decision-makers will have to struggle with in the years to come.  

The first and most obvious one is not new: how to deal with hostage-takers? Negotiating with them is a matter of life or death for the hostages but confirms the hostage-taker’s assumption that maximum pressure may be rewarded. In this case, last week’s swap substantiates the Kremlin’s assumption that jailing Western citizens (if necessary, on completely forged charges) is an efficient lever to push the West into free Russian operatives. The more Western citizens are jailed, the better the chances are to get a deal done, as apparently no Western decision-maker will spare efforts to bring them back home. Pressure on the West to make the swap also stemmed from its concerns over the health conditions of several Russian political prisoners, whose lives may have been at stake if they remained in jail. Whether intentionally or not, Alexei Navalny’s death probably increased pressure on Western decision-makers to make a deal with the Kremlin and secure their liberation before it was too late. Russia still detains a number of Western citizens and hundreds of Russian political prisoners and may want to use them for future swaps. In light of this recent deal, the Kremlin is probably more confident than ever that the West can be blackmailed into concessions – the question is only how much pressure it will require.

The second dilemma has to do with the situation of Western citizens living in or travelling to Russia. Any one of them could become a token in Russia’s bargain with the West. Western governments can’t consider that their citizens are safe in Russia, especially if they are accredited there as journalists. But acknowledging this and drawing the logical consequences – ie, advising Western citizens not to travel or settle in Russia – would only further diminish the possibilities for interactions with Russians in Russia and the quality of information regarding developments in the country. Ultimately, it would increase the Russian population’s isolation and make the country even more hermetic to Western influence – two goals the Kremlin has been actively pursuing since the invasion of Ukraine, if not before. If and when political change happens in Russia, such isolation would also shrink the West’s chances of building a different relationship with those in Russia. The dilemma here is therefore between ensuring the safety of Western citizens now versus preserving some possibilities to engage with Russian society now and in the longer term.

Last but not least, swapping Russian political prisoners against spies and operatives allows the Kremlin to artificially equate them and therefore feed its narrative depicting Russian opposition as “foreign agents”: if they were not foreign agents, why would the West want them out of jail? This is one of the main messages the Kremlin wanted to convey to the Russian public through this prisoner exchange: spies are patriots serving their country, whereas opposition politicians and civil society activists are traitors serving foreign interests. This explains Russian dissident Ilya Yashin’s frustration at being swapped against his will. Yashin’s whole political fight had been about contesting the Kremlin’s definition of patriotism and about asserting his right, as a Russian citizen, to pursue another future for Russia. Taking him out of his country will allow the Russian government to make his claim even less audible to the Russian public and to discredit it as an attempted interference by a foreign agent.

None of the above is to question the legitimacy and necessity of the exchange that took place on 1 August. Bringing foreign citizens out of Russian jails and probably saving the lives of Russian political prisoners is a diplomatic success and moral achievement that justifies the difficult decisions Western decision-makers had to make. But they should be prepared to face further such decisions and limit, wherever possible, the possibilities for Russia to blackmail them into questionable concessions. Preventing Western citizens from travelling to Russia would be a mistake. However, they should be properly informed on the dangers they may face and given advice on how to minimise the risk of arrest and how to behave if the worst does happen.

More prisoner exchanges are likely to happen in the future. There are currently several Western citizens jailed in Russia who were not part of this exchange, in addition to hundreds of political prisoners whose names are less known in the West than those of Vladimir Kara-Murza, Oleg Orlov, or Ilya Yashin. Finally, Western decision-makers should assume that the best chances for the democratic Russian opposition to survive are in the West and therefore devise a policy that allows Russian democrats to safely pursue their political agenda without being seen by the Russian public as agents of the West.