Think very carefully before going to Russia or Iran

The UA and German governments faced an agonising decision on whether to agree the prisoner exchange which released sixteen innocent US and German citizens and Russian dissidents, one of whom also has British nationality in exchange for a Russian state assassin and seven other Russian spies or criminals.

Let's be quite clear about what has happened here. The present government of the Russian Federation - like the so-called "Islamic Republic of Iran" is a gangster regime. Both of these regimes lock up people who are either entirely innocent, or would be innocent under any civilised code of laws, in order to crush dissent or as an act of hostage diplomacy to obtain leverage against other countries by imprisoning their citizens on trumped-up charges.

I have the gravest reservations about this decision by the US and German governments but President Biden and Chancellor Scholtz are not the bad guys here, they were faced with an impossible choice - whether to leave their citizens to rot in a Russian jail or make a deal to release them which may incentivise Putin and other leaders of gangster regimes to grab more of their citizens in future.

To their credit the German government have been quite open about how difficult this situation was.

“Nobody took lightly this decision to deport a murderer sentenced to life imprisonment after only a few years in prison,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said while waiting for those freed to arrive at the airport in Cologne Thursday evening.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock referred in a radio interview to Thursday’s large-scale prisoner swap as a “highly sensitive dilemma” that “rightly leads to much, much need for conversation.”

The assassin returned to Russia under the deal was Colonel  Vadim Krasikov, an agent of Russia's secret service who was sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany after being convicted of murdering a Chechen dissident in a public Berlin park in broad daylight in 2019. The family of the Krasikov's felt “disappointed” and found the decision “incomprehensible,” according to Inga Schulz, the lawyer who represented them at the trial.

“This could set a precedent,” said Roderich Kiesewetter, from the opposition Christian Democratic Union,  “I fear that the risk of sabotage or terrorism by Russia will increase,” he added, as Russian President Vladimir Putin had shown his henchmen have no reason to fear consequences.

The German government did not commute Krasikov’s sentence. Rather, in a historic first, Justice Minister Marco Buschmann instructed the public prosecutor to suspend Krasikov’s sentence for deportation — meaning he could be immediately arrested if he reentered Germany, according to a spokesperson from the justice ministry.

Britain has traditionally been very wary indeed about taking part in this kind of exchange precisely because past British governments - Conservative and Labour - had been concerned that it might create extra incentive for hostile regimes to take more British citizens as hostages in the future.

I would strongly advise any Western citizen reading this not to set foot in territory controlled by the Russian or Iranian regime unless you absolutely have to.

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