Former President Donald Trump often brags about his good personal relationship with Vladimir Putin. He has stated in the past that, if he is elected president, he would use it to immediately end the war in Ukraine or even to prevent a third world war. His latest promise came this morning, when he assured in a publication in Truth Social that he will secure the release of Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal journalist detained in Russia, before assuming the presidency in January if he wins. the November elections.
Gershkovich “will be released almost immediately after the election, but definitely before I take office. He will be HOME, SAFE AND WITH HIS FAMILY from him. Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, will do it for me, but he wouldn’t do it for anyone else, and WE WILL NOT PAY ANYTHING! ”The Republican candidate has posted.
The journalist was arrested in March of last year while reporting in Russia on charges of espionage, an accusation that both he and his newspaper, as well as Joe Biden’s administration, have strongly denied. More than a year after his arrest, he remains held in a Moscow prison with no trial date scheduled.
The Kremlin’s response to the magnate’s comment has not been long in coming. The Russian government has assured that “there is no contact between Putin and Trump on this matter.” Putin said in February that “a deal is possible” for Gershkovich’s release and suggested that in return Moscow would ask for the release of Vadim Krasikov, imprisoned in Germany for the 2019 murder of a Chechen dissident in Berlin.
The spokesman for the Russian presidency, Dmitry Peskov, asked this morning to maintain silence on this matter, which is being discussed through a confidential channel of direct communication between Moscow and Washington. “Any contact regarding those imprisoned or condemned must be carried out in complete silence and discreetly,” Peskov noted: “Only in this way will it be productive.”
During the Cold War, both capitals were involved in several episodes of prisoner exchanges, often during the night, on the Glienicke Bridge in divided Berlin, which were portrayed in the film Bridge of Spies (2015), by Steven Spielberg. The Biden administration revived that rite in December 2022, when Moscow traded Brittney Griner, the American basketball star convicted in Russia of a drug crime, for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
Trump already requested the release of Gershkovich last week in an interview with Time magazine, in which he described the journalist as a “brave young man” and distanced himself from the occupant of the White House: “my difference with Biden is that I “I am going to achieve his release, Putin is going to free him.”
The president said last year that he will “work every day” to achieve this, following the State Department’s official assessment that he had been “unfairly detained,” which commits the US government to working for his release. In December, U.S. negotiators said they had made an offer to Russia to release him and Paul Whelan, the only other U.S. citizen detained “unjustly” in the country, according to the State Department.
Trump assures that he is the only one who can achieve it. When he was president, he did not hide his admiration for Putin, with whom he met twice, in Helsinki (Finland) and Osaka (Japan), on the occasion of the G-20 summit. In 2018, he refused to blame Putin for meddling in the 2016 presidential elections, casting doubt on the conclusions of his own intelligence agencies and unleashing strong criticism in the United States. And recently, he assured a rally that, at a summit of NATO, told the leader of “a great European country” that he would “encourage Russia to do whatever the hell it wants” to allies who do not spend enough on defense.
The Republican candidate has not specified under what terms Gershkovich’s release would occur, nor has he specified how he would put an immediate end to the war in Ukraine thanks to his relationship with Putin.
