Putin is playing the long game in last week’s giant prisoner exchange, says retired Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis. The biggest exchange between Russia and The West since the Cold War Era included 24 people, U.S. officials said.
Women’s basketball star Brittney Griner was released previously in December 2022 after being detained for 10 months. The U.S. gave up a Russian arms dealer in that exchange. Viktor Bout had been nicknamed “The Merchant of Death.”
Among those released last week was Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, held since March 2023. He generated the most headlines of the recent American detainees in Russia. Also released were Paul Whelan, a former Marine who had been held in Russia for five and a half years, and Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva.
Whelan was a security professional at the time of his arrest in 2018. He served in the Marines from 2003-2008 and received a bad-conduct discharge, according to The New York Post.
Gershkovich and Whelan were detained on espionage charges, Kurmasheva for allegedly “spreading false information” about the Russian military.
Eight Russian prisoners were released last week in an exchange that also involved the countries of Norway, Germany, Poland and Slovenia. The Russians regained alleged spies, the BBC reported.
“Certainly, we celebrate the freedom these people have, but the Germans had to give back an assassin – a spy, an FSB – to the Russians, along with others who were spies or outright criminals, mostly crypto criminals, who have been used by the Kremlin to undermine the West and of course to steal blind billions and billions of dollars of intellectual property as well other types of property,” Maginnis said on Washington Watch Friday.
Putin signed off for two reasons
Putin agreed to the exchange for two key reasons, Maginnis told show host Jody Hice. “One, he really wants to send a message to his spy network around the world that he’s going to cover their backs. They get arrested and incarcerated; he’ll make deals to get them back home.”
It seems that message has been delivered. The second objective deals with Putin’s desire to be seen as a statesman.
“What essentially they want to do is demonstrate that you can work with the Russians. They’re pragmatic, you can negotiate with them,” Maginnis explained. “Of course, what Putin wants to walk away with is a big slice of Ukraine under his belt – and as a result, NATO bows to that particular bargain. Whether or not the West goes along with that is to be determined. There’s a lot of gamesmanship going on here as well.”
Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s outgoing secretary general, predicted a 10-year war in Ukraine if Western nations do not commit to the fight, the BBC reported. Stoltenberg is concerned that U.S. backing for the war could lessen or even stop if Donald Trump is elected president.
“When we communicate very clearly that we are here for the long haul, that we have strong enduring support for Ukraine, then we have the conditions for a solution where Ukraine prevails as a sovereign independent state,” he told the BBC.
The prisoner exchange had been discussed for a long time. But it’s being presented with more shine than it should, according to Maginnis.
“The negotiation was intense. It involved eight countries,” he said. “The Biden administration will tell you they’ve helped 70 people who were wrongly incarcerated by various entities across the world to be freed.
Trump, however, argued the exchange makes a target of every American traveling abroad.
“When you start paying money or making deals where the kind of people … these are really some tough people they got back, the toughest in the world, you start doing that, and all of a sudden you have a lot of hostages taken prisoner, so to speak. It’s a very bad precedent,” he told Fox News.
Maginnis agreed. “Putting a dollar sign on the back of every American traveling to some of these bizarre locations is very dangerous. We certainly did it with the Iranian release a year or so ago. I hope we didn’t do it with these people,” he said.
All eyes on Israel
Shifting gears, Maginnis told Hice the increased tension between Iran and Israel has been a long time coming.
Israel specifically but also the world is braced for an Iranian response to Israel’s recent targeted killings of Hamas and Hezbollah leadership. Escalation in the war that began with Hamas’ terrorist attacks on Oct. 7 now stems from a Hezbollah rocket blast on an Israeli soccer field in the Golan Heights that killed 12, mostly children and teens.
“It’s not a surprise given the shadow war that has obviously been going on between Israel and Iran for a long time,” Maginnis said.
He sees more attacks, both ways and mostly through proxies – with U.S. troops getting caught in the crossfire.
“It’s quite possible that not only will Israel and Iran go to fisticuffs in one form or another, mostly through proxies, but U.S. forces that are nearby in Bahrain, Iraq, Syria and the like will take fire from militia groups that are under the control of the Quds force, which of course works directly for the Iranian ayatollah,” Maginnis said.
