(Bloomberg) -- Russia is releasing Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former US Marine Paul Whelan as part of a major prisoner swap with the US, according to people familiar with the situation.
The men, jailed in Russia on espionage charges they and the US deny, are en route to destinations outside of Russia. The US and its allies will return prisoners to Russia that they hold under the deal, the people said, asking for anonymity to discuss matters that aren’t yet public.
The Kremlin is also releasing dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza as part of the agreement, a European official said on condition of anonymity. An activist with dual Russian-British citizenship, Kara-Murza, 42, has been a persistent campaigner against President Vladimir Putin’s rule and was given a record 25-year prison sentence in April last year on treason and other charges for criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Further details of the exchange weren’t immediately available. The US has been in extensive talks to achieve the release of Gershkovich and Whelan, who were designated as wrongly detained by the State Department.
Putin said in June that Russian and US intelligence services were in contact and that President Joe Biden’s administration was taking energetic steps to secure Gershkovich’s release.
Earlier this year, Russia claimed it was close to a deal for an exchange that would have included Gershkovich, Whelan and Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, before the latter’s death in February in an Arctic penal colony. A Western official in the weeks after the death of Putin’s most prominent critic confirmed talks took place but denied an agreement was imminent.
Gershkovich, 32, was arrested in March of last year while on a reporting assignment in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg and accused of spying for the CIA. He and the newspaper rejected the accusations.
He was convicted last month and sentenced to 16 years, the first time since the Cold War that Russia had put a US reporter on trial for espionage.
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Whelan, who was detained in 2018, was sentenced to 16 years in 2020 on spying charges he denied.
(Updates with background from fifth paragraph. An earlier version of this story was corrected to reflect that the Americans have not been released yet)
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