Biden prisoner exchange ignites debate on ‘steep price’ to free Americans

President Biden’s historic deal to free high-profile Americans from Russian prisons has ignited a debate over the high cost and strategic wisdom of such exchanges, with Republicans and even some Democrats warning it will only embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin and like-minded adversaries. 

For decades, presidential administrations and Congress have grappled with how to deter and respond to hostage-taking and politically motivated arrests of Americans. It’s a problem that is grounded in extortion efforts, but each case is unique to the circumstances. 

“It’s very easy for someone who’s not currently in power to say, ‘Oh, that’s a horrible deal. Why did you do that?’ But I think if you go back to the record, hostage takers don’t return hostages for nothing,” said Jason Rezian, the Washington Post columnist who was imprisoned in Iran for 544 days before being released in a multilayer deal, including a prisoner swap, during the Obama administration.

“They don’t take hostages for the fun of it. They do it because they see it as an opportunity.”

Former President Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, boasted he would have made a better deal than Biden with Russian President Vladimir Putin to secure the release of those wrongfully imprisoned. 

Biden’s multilayered deal — which freed 16 people in exchange for eight Russian nationals held in jails in the U.S. and Europe — appeared to hinge on Germany’s decision to release a convicted Russian assassin. Vadim Krasikov was serving a life sentence for the murder of a Georgian-Chechen dissident in 2019. 

“We would have gotten him back, we wouldn’t have had to pay anything, we wouldn’t have had to let some of the great killers of the world go,” Trump said in an interview with Fox, referring to Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter freed as part of the deal, and others.

Biden, asked by a reporter at the White House to respond to Trump’s assertions, asked: “Why didn’t he do it when he was president?”

Paul Whelan, freed in Biden’s prisoner exchange, was arrested in 2018 during Trump’s term in office. Trump said he rejected a deal to release convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout to secure Whelan’s release. American Trevor Reed was also arrested by Russia during the Trump administration; he was freed under Biden in exchange for a Russian pilot convicted of drug smuggling. Bout was later traded to release WNBA star Brittney Griner from Russian custody in December 2022. 

Despite assertions he traded nothing to secure the release of U.S. citizens jailed or held hostage overseas, Trump’s record of freeing Americans held abroad is filled with deals marked by prisoner exchanges, release of terrorists and diplomatic overtures. 

Trump has said he secured the release of 59 Americans during his first term in office. 

Those deals included the 2019 release of three senior Taliban leaders from jail in Afghanistan for the release of an American and Australian. In 2020, the Trump administration secured the release of two Americans held by the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen, in exchange for the repatriation of about 250 Yemenis to the Houthi-controlled capital of Sanaa. 

Trump also engaged in one-for-one exchanges to free Americans — in 2019 trading an Iranian scientist convicted of violating sanctions for Xiyue Wang, an American academic.

Wang, following his release from an Iranian prison, criticized Democrats for having a weak foreign policy and said it’s a “fair argument” that Trump could have gotten a better deal.

“I was arrested in Iran when Obama was in office, Princeton’s fancy connections with the Obama establishment made no difference for me,” he posted on the social media site X on Thursday.

“Trump’s deal with Iran that released me gave Iran barely a little more than nothing. The U.S. can only make that kind of deal with a strong foreign policy posturing, which the Biden administration doesn’t have.”

Trump allies ran with that attack line in the wake of the return of the four Americans from Russia. 

“Essentially, we’ve traded journalists for murderers and thieves, and it’s like trading a rifle for a spoon,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) said on Fox News. 

But Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, took a more muted tone, describing Biden’s deal as a “steep price” and calling to redouble efforts to bring back two Americans who remain imprisoned in Russia.

This includes American Marc Fogel, who was working as a teacher in Russia and was arrested in 2021 for carrying marijuana he said was for medical use. He was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to 14 years in prison. Lawmakers have pushed for the State Department to label Fogel “wrongfully detained” — a distinction that was applied to three of the Americans released.

Dual U.S.-Russian citizen Ksenia Karelina, who traveled to Russia to visit family, was detained in February and accused of treason, with Russia’s security services accusing her of collecting funds for the Ukrainian army. Her family said she donated $51.80 to a charity providing humanitarian aid in Ukraine. 

“Efforts to free those two must be redoubled, along with ways to deter future hostage diplomacy,” Risch said in his statement. 

That tone echoed a joint statement by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who called for more efforts to deter rogue governments jailing Americans.

“Trading hardened Russian criminals for innocent Americans does little to discourage [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s reprehensible behavior,” they said. 

Rezian, who is part of the bipartisan Commission on Hostage Taking and Wrongful Detention at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said, overall, the tone of criticisms about deals to get Americans home have softened over the years. 

“I think there’s an acceptance and an acknowledgement that when Americans who’ve been illegally held hostage abroad come home, and are reunited with their families, it’s really unseemly to question whether that was the right thing to do or not,” he said. 

“Eight and a half years ago, when I came home, that was not the case.”

Congress has sought to address hostage-taking by state actors. In 2020, Congress passed the Robert Levinson Act Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act to provide the State Department more resources to advocate on behalf of Americans taken abroad and impose sanctions on hostage-takers. 

In 2022, Biden signed an executive order to facilitate more cooperation and communication between the State Department and National Security Council to work on recovering Americans detained abroad. The order also focused on increasing warnings for Americans on dangerous places around the world where there is a high-risk of politically-motivated arrests, kidnappings and hostage-taking. 

But there’s little in these efforts that put in place actual deterrence to discourage hostage-taking in the first place. 

“Until there’s a higher cost and a realistic cost to doing this, governments are going to keep doing that. And that’s really at the core of what the commission is looking at,” Rezian said of the Commission on Hostage Taking and Wrongful Detention.

The commission co-chairs are Trump’s former national security adviser and former lead for hostage negotiations, Robert O’Brien, and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.).

“What is a thoughtful, robust policy that responds to the hostage crisis at the moment? Because there certainly is one. What does that look like? What should it look like? That’s what we’re trying to come up with,” Rezian said. 

When asked on Thursday what more can be done to keep countries from detaining Americans, Biden put the onus on U.S. citizens. 

“By advising people not to go certain places, telling them what’s at risk and what’s at stake,” he said.