Hi! I hope you’re doing well. Something happened this week that I thought was worth talking about.
As someone who writes about espionage, I’m fascinated by the recent exchange of prisoners between Russia and the west. There’s the obvious surface details about the complex, multi-national negotiations necessary to make it all happen, the human interest stories of these people who find themselves pawns in an intricate game, and the tense cinematic image of all these parties coming together on an airport runway in Ankara to make the trade.
But there are also some things beneath the surface that give me pause. It reminds me that John Crane’s world is a spy fantasy. Real espionage is not much fun. It’s physically and morally brutal, often with horrifying impacts on innocent people caught up in its whirlwind. There are two details of this deal in particular that struck me.
One is the fate of Alexei Navalny, the charismatic anti-corruption crusader and political rival to Putin who died in a Russian prison in February. It’s been widely reported that this deal, which was in the works for quite a long time, was originally meant to include his release. I was listening to an interview yesterday with a journalist who’s been closely involved with Navalny’s people in Germany, and he said that, while western negotiators were talking with their Russian counterparts about including Navalny, Putin hadn’t signed off on it. In fact, they were afraid to even raise the idea of freeing Navalny with Putin.
