Prisoners set to be freed in Russia-West exchange
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 1 August 2024
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Three US citizens - reporter Evan Gershkovich, Marine veteran Paul Whelan, and Russian-American radio journalist Alsu Kurmasheva - imprisoned in Russia are expected to be released today under a major prisoner exchange deal between Russia and the West.
The exchange will involve 24 prisoners held in Russia, the US, Germany and three other Western countries.
Also in the programme: Israel says its received information confirming that the head of Hamas' military wing in Gaza was killed in an airstrike; and the US says it's reached a plea deal with three men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks - but some families of the victims say they're furious at the way the cases have been handled.
(Photo shows the journalist Evan Gershkovich standing inside a glass defendant's cage in Yekaterinburg's Sverdlovsk Regional Court, Russia on 19 July 2024, Credit; Stringer/EPA)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and |
| 0:05.0 | welcome to New Zealand from the BBC World Service we're coming to you live from London. |
| 0:09.0 | I'm James Menendez and a very busy program today in a few minutes time we are going to be heading to the Middle East but we're going to start with some breaking news that's come in in just the past few minutes. |
| 0:19.8 | The Biden administration has said it's agreed a prisoner exchange with Russia involving at least |
| 0:24.8 | three American citizens being held in Russian prisons. |
| 0:29.0 | Let's talk straight away to our correspondent Sarah Rainsford who's been following all of this and Sarah what more can you tell us? |
| 0:35.6 | Yeah this is the news coming from the White House confirming what had been rumored for some time but not substantiated. Now the White House |
| 0:45.4 | the Biden administration are saying that three American citizens are |
| 0:48.6 | going to be heading home, that they've secured their release from Russian |
| 0:51.8 | prisons. They're naming the journalist |
| 0:54.3 | Evan Gerschkovich who worked for the works for the Wall Street Journal and had been |
| 0:58.4 | convicted of espionage, the US Marine, former US Marine, Paul Wielen, and also Kormacheva, who is a journalist with an American outlet and had been arrested last year. |
| 1:12.0 | Now, Paul Welen was serving 16 years for espionage, |
| 1:16.8 | Evan Gerskovich, 16 years for espionage. |
| 1:19.4 | Also, was serving a six and a half year sentence for supposedly spreading false |
| 1:24.5 | information about the military or three of them had always denied any kind of |
| 1:29.2 | guilt right from the very beginning and in the case of Evan his employers his friends his family had called the charges absurd from the very beginning in the case of Paul Wielen he's told me personally multiple times that he's not a spy, that he's a political hostage and that |
| 1:45.2 | claims that he was collecting information for US intelligence were |
| 1:49.2 | absolute nonsense. So this is a huge deal which has taken a very long time to negotiate and appears to be part of a very complex |
| 1:58.0 | multi-country, multi-prisoner swap. |
| 2:01.0 | We're still waiting for details of the rest of it, but this is the |
| 2:03.8 | headline news for the moment that three American citizens who've been held in |
... |
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