Signs of a major prisoner exchange between Russia and Belarus on one side and the United States, Germany and Slovenia on the other, multiplied on Thursday but there was no official confirmation of what may be the biggest swap since the Cold War.
Fox News reported that jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was set to return to the United States as part of a prisoner exchange, possibly later on Thursday.
Flight tracking site Flightradar24 showed that a special Russian government plane used for a previous prisoner swap, involving the United States and Russia, had flown from Moscow to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad which borders Poland and Lithuania before heading back to the Russian capital.
Pervy Otdel (First Department), an association that specialises in defending people in Russian cases of treason and espionage, said the flight could mean that a prisoner exchange had taken place on the Polish border.
Reuters could not confirm that and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, when asked about reports of a looming major prisoner exchange, said: “I’m still not making any comments on this.”
Paul Whelan, a former U.S. marine, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian-British dissident, both jailed in Russia, have suddenly disappeared from view, their lawyers said a day earlier, after at least seven Russian dissidents were unexpectedly moved from their prisons in recent days.
