In a video published on YouTube on Monday, Maria Pevchikh, the president of Russian dissident Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, claimed that negotiations had been underway for two years for a prisoner exchange that should have led to Navalny’s release, if he had not died on February 16 in a maximum security prison in Siberia, Russia. According to Pevchikh, the deal was very close to being concluded: «Alexei Navalny could have been sitting here right now. He is not a rhetorical figure, it could and should have happened.” Pevchikh accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of killing Navalny, saying he would have opposed the deal to free him.
Pevchikh claims to have “received confirmation that the negotiations were in their final stage on the evening of February 15”, the day before the news of Navalny’s death broke. The president of the Anti-Corruption Foundation said that Navalny should have been freed together with “two US citizens” in exchange for Vadim Krasikov, a former agent of the Russian security services (FSB, the successor agency to the better-known KGB) who is in prison in Germany dal 2021 for having killed the former commander of the Chechen rebels Zelimkhan Khangoshvili on German territory in 2019.
In particular, according to Pevchikh, Navalny’s release would have been a necessary condition imposed by Western countries for any negotiations for Krasikov’s release. Again according to Pevchikh, Putin ordered the killing of Navalny to exclude a possible release of him and to reserve the possibility of “offering someone else” in exchange for Krasikov’s release, “at another time”.
According to Kira Yarmysh, his spokeswoman, Navalny he wasn’t aware details of the alleged negotiations for the possible exchange, but he knew they were ongoing.
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None of the three countries involved – Russia, Germany and the United States – have yet commented on Pevchikh’s statements and it is not even known who the two US citizens involved in the exchange were supposed to be. In any case, a few weeks ago Putin told the American TV host Tucker Carlson that talks were underway between Russia and the United States for the release of the American journalist Wall Street Journal Evan Gershkovich, detained in Russia on charges of espionage, implying that Russia would have wanted Krasikov’s release in exchange. It is not possible to confirm this information at the moment.
In September 2023, however, the Wall Street Journal had written that secret negotiations were underway for Krasikov’s release in exchange for some Western citizens and dissidents detained in Russia. The article said that Alexei Navalny was also among the affected prisoners. Two days after his death, on February 18, the German newspaper Bild he had argued that Navalny had died just as the negotiations that would have led to his release in exchange for that of Krasikov were being concluded. However, the Bild had not revealed the identity of its sources and not being considered a particularly reliable newspaper, this news had not been picked up by the most authoritative international newspapers.