Putin ‘Might Be Celebrating’ After Prisoner Swap With Biden Admin

Fox News chief international correspondent Steve Harrigan on Thursday said Russian President Vladimir Putin may be elated about his country’s prisoner swap with President Joe Biden’s administration and American allies.

Russia freed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan in exchange for a Russian assassin, among others in the 24-person trade, according to CBS News. Harrigan on “The Story With Martha MacCallum” said it was “a successful hostage operation” for Russia and that the Kremlin may be rejoicing about the deal they pulled off.

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“We’re hearing about all the celebration on the American side, but there might be celebrating going on in the Kremlin as well too. This was basically a successful hostage operation carried out by Vladimir Putin,” Harrigan said. “He grabbed a Wall Street Journal Reporter, threw him in solitary confinement for 16 months and got the man he wanted, a killer, out of jail. And it’s a little bit sad for me to remember being back in Russia in the 90s’, under Boris Yeltsin when, you know, conditions were tough, but you never felt like the state back then was really targeting you.”

“You could do critical reports. And now we’re hearing this phrase over and over again, ‘abductor state.’ You know, when you’re in a war zone as a journalist, Iraq, Afghanistan, things break down. Armed groups might try and kidnap a journalist,” he added. “But when it’s the state, when it’s the president, when it’s his security forces targeting journalists, this is a whole ‘nother level and it’s hard to see really how you can defend yourself against an abductor state.”

Gershkovich was arrested in Russia in 2023 over accusations of espionage, recently receiving a sentence of 16 years in prison. It was the first time since the Cold War that an American reporter faced trial for espionage in Russia.

Whelan criticized the Biden administration in June for failing to retrieve him and Gershkovich, pleading with the U.S. to pressure Russia into releasing them.

Biden’s administration in late 2022 orchestrated a prisoner swap where the U.S. sent Russia an arms dealer known as “The Merchant of Death” in return for WNBA star Brittney Griner, but not Whelan.

“The US needs to go out and do something — fill up Guantanamo Bay with Russian officials, arrest Russian spies, do something that makes the Kremlin sit up and take notice and say, ‘Okay, yeah, right, now it’s time that we’re gonna get Evan and Paul back and then we want back what you’ve got of ours, and we’ll call it a day,” he previously told CNN.