By DASHA LITVINOVA and ERIC TUCKER

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — One was a journalist on a reporting trip. Another was attending a wedding. Yet another was a dual national returning to visit family.

All are U.S. citizens now behind bars in Russia on various charges.

Arrests of Americans in Russia are increasingly common with relations sinking to Cold War lows. Washington accuses Moscow of using U.S. citizens as bargaining chips, but Russia insists they all broke the law.

While high-profile prisoner exchanges have occurred, the prospects of swaps are unclear.

“It seems that since Moscow itself has cut off most of the communication channels and does not know how to restore them properly without losing face, they are trying to use the hostages. … At least that’s what it looks like,” said Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who quit after Moscow invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Who is known to be in Russian custody?

EVAN GERSHKOVICH — The 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter faces trial Wednesday on espionage charges that he, his employer and the U.S. government deny. He was detained in March 2023 while reporting in the city of Yekaterinburg and accused of spying. Russia alleges Gershkovich was “gathering secret information” at the CIA’s behest about a facility that produces and repairs military equipment. It provided no evidence to support the accusations.

PAUL WHELAN — The 54-year-old corporate security executive from Michigan was arrested in 2018 in Moscow where he was attending a friend’s wedding, convicted two years later of espionage, and sentenced to 16 years in prison. He maintains his innocence, saying the charges were fabricated.

TRAVIS LEAKE — The musician was arrested in 2023 on drug charges. An Instagram page describes him as the singer for the band Lovi Noch (Seize the Night). Court officials have said he is a former paratrooper.

MARC FOGEL — The Moscow teacher was sentenced to 14 years in prison, also on drug charges. The Interfax news agency said Fogel taught at the Anglo-American School in Moscow and had worked at the U.S. Embassy. Interfax cited court officials as saying Fogel has admitted guilt.

GORDON BLACK — The 34-year-old staff sergeant stationed at Fort Cavazos, Texas, was convicted June 19 in Vladivostok of stealing and making threats against his girlfriend, and was sentenced to three years and nine months in prison. He had flown to Russia from his U.S. military post in South Korea without authorization and was arrested in May after she accused him of stealing from her, according to U.S. and Russian authorities.

ROBERT WOODLAND — Woodland, a dual national, is on trial in Moscow on drug- trafficking charges. Russian media reported his name matches a U.S. citizen interviewed in 2020 who said he was born in the Perm region in 1991 and adopted by an American couple at age 2. He said he traveled to Russia to find his mother and eventually met her on a TV show. Woodland was charged with trafficking drugs as part of an organized group — punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

ALSU KURMASHEVA — Kurmasheva, a dual U.S.-Russian national, was arrested in 2023 in her hometown of Kazan. The Prague-based editor for the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Tatar-Bashkir service was visiting her ailing mother. She faces multiple charges, including not self-reporting as a “foreign agent” and spreading false information about the Russian military.

KSENIA KHAVANA — Khavana, 33, was arrested in Yekaterinburg in February on treason charges, accused of collecting money for Ukraine’s military. Independent Russian news outlet Mediazona identified her by her maiden name of Karelina, and said she had U.S. citizenship after marrying an American. She returned to Russia from Los Angeles to visit family. The rights group Pervy Otdel said the charges stem from a $51 donation to a U.S. charity that helps Ukraine.

DAVID BARNES — An engineer from Texas, Barnes was arrested while visiting his sons in Russia, where their mother had taken them. His supporters say the woman made baseless claims of sexual abuse that already had been discredited by Texas investigators but he was convicted in Russia anyway and sentenced to prison.

What’s the process for negotiations?

Gershkovich and Whelan have gotten the most attention, with the State Department designating both as wrongfully detained. The designation is applied to only a small subset of Americans jailed by foreign countries.

Those cases go to a special State Department envoy for hostage affairs, who tries to negotiate their release. They must meet certain criteria, including a determination the arrest came solely because the person is a U.S. national or part of an effort to influence U.S. policy or extract concessions from the government.

The U.S. successfully negotiated swaps in 2022 for WNBA star Brittney Griner and Marine veteran Trevor Reed — both designated as wrongfully detained. Moscow got arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was serving a 25-year sentence, and pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, serving 20 years for cocaine trafficking.

It’s unclear how many Americans are jailed in Russia or if negotiations are in the works for them.

Kurmasheva’s husband, Pavel Butorin, told The Associated Press after her arrest he hoped the U.S. government would use “every avenue and every means available to it” to win her release, including designating her as wrongfully detained.

Is the West holding anyone Russia wants?

In December, the State Department said it had made a significant offer for Gershkovich and Whelan but Russia rejected it.

Officials did not give details, although Russia has been said to be seeking Vadim Krasikov, serving a life sentence in Germany in 2021 for the killing of Zelimkhan “Tornike” Khangoshvili, a Georgian citizen of Chechen descent who had fought Russian troops in Chechnya and later claimed asylum in Germany.

President Vladimir Putin, asked about releasing Gershkovich, appeared to refer to Krasikov by pointing to a man imprisoned by a U.S. ally for “liquidating a bandit” who had allegedly killed Russian soldiers in Chechnya.

Beyond that, Russia has stayed silent. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says such swaps “must be carried out in absolute silence.”

Historically, when relations are better, “the exchanges seem to be smoother,” said Nina Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School in New York and the great-granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

She cited prisoner swaps between the USSR and Chile in the 1970s, as well as those with the U.S. and Germany shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev took office in the 1980s involving dissidents Vladimir Bukovsky and Natan Sharansky.

Ultimately, the decision “is only in Putin’s hands,” Khrushcheva said.

In Gershkovich’s case, an exchange might also involve concessions, possibly related to Ukraine, said Sam Greene of the Center for European Policy Analysis.

“Even if the immediate reason to get people around the (negotiating) table is Evan and a prisoner exchange, that allows them to get right up to the line and to say: ‘OK, we’ve got 98% of the deal, but if you really want to get this done, there’s this other thing we’d really like to talk about,’” like sanctions or another Ukraine-related issue, he said.

“The Kremlin is perfectly happy to hold onto Evan as long as it possibly can. And so its incentive is to get as much for him as possible,” Greene said.

Tucker reported from Washington.

Aliya Schneider | (TNS) The Philadelphia Inquirer

PHILADELPHIA — Delaware State Senator Sarah McBride, who is poised to become the first openly transgender member of Congress, thinks she can help garner respect for transgender people by being a strong legislator in Washington.

McBride, 33, already the nation’s highest-ranking openly transgender elected official, said diversity in Congress has both a symbolic and substantive effect, but she isn’t running on her identity. Instead, by proving to be an effective legislator, she hopes to inspire acceptance through what she called the “power of proximity.”

“Once you respect someone as a really, really hardworking legislator, it’s hard not to then see them as a person; it’s hard not to see other people like them as people,” she said in an interview.

McBride will be on the ballot in November to replace U.S. Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, D., Delaware, who was first elected in 2016 and is running for Senate this year. McBride’s only remaining serious competitor, Eugene Young, recently dropped out of the Sept. 10 primary after Delaware State Treasurer Colleen Davis also exited the race earlier this year. McBride, who has raised at least $1.8 million for her campaign, has since secured the endorsement of top House Democrats. Her Republican opponent, Donyale Hall, had raised only $13,584 as of March 31.

The district is considered blue and has elected Democrats to the House for more than a decade.

McBride’s campaign comes at a moment of political division over transgender rights. During his rally in Philadelphia on Saturday, former President Donald Trump vowed, if elected, to sign an executive order on his first day in office “to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory” or “transgender insanity,” and prevent transgender women from participating in women’s sports. His crowd of supporters roared.

“How embarrassing it is itto say we will keep men out of women’s sports?” Trump said. “Who would want men to play women’s sports?”

McBride said “the MAGA movement’s obsession with trans people” is part of a “manufactured culture war” that riles up Trump loyalists but doesn’t reflect voters more broadly. She views it as a strategic distraction from problems for which the former president doesn’t have solutions, she said.

The attacks get through in the first place due to a “knowledge gap” about LGBTQ people, she said.

“As people begin to understand the humanity of the people impacted by a particular political debate, the clock ends up running out on anti-equality politicians’ ability to target and scapegoat,” McBride said. “We saw it with with gay people and marriage equality … and I think the same will be true for transgender people. But that only comes when there’s full representation.”

Despite the vicious rhetoric that can be found in conservative politics surrounding transgender rights, McBride believes she can “gain unlikely allies” in Washington over time.

McBride has worked across the aisle and with politicians whose views on LGBTQ rights trouble her, and has found common ground on more issues than people expect, such as health care access, disinformation, paid family leave, and gun safety legislation, she said.

While the trust and familiarity that comes with collaboration may not immediately turn conservatives into strong allies, it can, over time, help open their “hearts and minds,” McBride said.

While she’s on track to win in November, candidates can still file to run in the September primary until July 9, and McBride said she won’t slow down her campaign.

“I have not won anything yet,” she said. “I continue to have to work to earn the support of Delawareans across the state to have the privilege of representing them, and I don’t take that responsibility lightly.”

___

©2024 The Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC. Visit at inquirer.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By CHARLOTTE GRAHAM-McLAY and JILL LAWLESS

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — He emerged on the information security scene in the 1990s as a “famous teenage hacker” following what he called an “ itinerant minstrel childhood” beginning in Townsville, Australia. But the story of Julian Assange, eccentric founder of secret-spilling website WikiLeaks, never became less strange — or less polarizing — after he jolted the United States and its allies by revealing secrets of how America conducted its wars.

Since Assange drew global attention in 2010 for his work with prominent news outlets to publish war logs and diplomatic cables that detailed U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other matters, he has provoked fervor among his admirers and loathing from his detractors with little in-between — seen either as a persecuted hero for open and transparent government, or a villain who put American lives at risk by aiding its enemies, and prompting fraught debates about state secrecy and freedom of the press.

Assange, 52, grew up attending “37 schools” before he was 14 years old, he wrote on his now-deleted blog. The details in it are not independently verifiable and some of Assange’s biographical details differ between accounts and interviews. A memoir published against his will in 2011, after he fell out with his ghostwriter, described him as the son of roving puppeteers, and he told The New Yorker in 2010 that his mother’s itinerant lifestyle barred him from a consistent or complete education. But by the age of 16, in 1987, he had his first modem, he told the magazine. Assange would burst forth as an accomplished hacker who with his friends broke into networks in North America and Europe.

In 1991, aged 20, Assange hacked a Melbourne terminal for a Canadian telecommunications company, leading to his arrest by the Australian Federal Police and 31 criminal charges. After pleading guilty to some counts, he avoided jail time after the presiding judge attributed his crimes to merely “intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to – what’s the expression? – surf through these various computers.”

He later studied mathematics and physics at university, but did not complete a degree. By 2006, when he founded WikiLeaks, Assange’s delight at being able to traverse locked computer systems seemingly for fun developed into a belief that, as he wrote on his blog, “only revealed injustice can be answered; for man to do anything intelligent he has to know what’s actually going on.”

In the year of WikiLeaks’ explosive 2010 release of half a million documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the non-profit organization’s website was registered in Sweden and its legal entity in Iceland. Assange was “living in airports,” he told The New Yorker; he claimed his media company, with no paid staff, had hundreds of volunteers.

He called his work a kind of “scientific journalism,” Assange wrote in a 2010 op-ed in The Australian newspaper, in which readers could check reporting against the original documents that had prompted a story. Among the most potent in the cache of files published by WikiLeaks was video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.

Assange was not anti-war, he wrote in The Australian.

“But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies,” he said. “If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.”

U.S. prosecutors later said documents published by Assange included the names of Afghans and Iraqis who provided information to American and coalition forces, while the diplomatic cables he released exposed journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates and dissidents in repressive countries.

Assange said in a 2010 interview that it was “regrettable” that sources disclosed by WikiLeaks could be harmed, prosecutors said. Later, after a State Department legal adviser informed him of the risk to “countless innocent individuals” compromised by the leaks, Assange said he would work with mainstream news organizations to redact the names of individuals. WikiLeaks did hide some names but then published 250,000 cables a year later without hiding the identities of people named in the papers.

Weeks after the release of the largest document cache in 2010, a Swedish prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Assange based on one woman’s allegation of rape and another’s allegation of molestation.

Assange has always denied the accusations and, from Britain, fought efforts to extradite him to Sweden for questioning. He decried the allegations as a smear campaign and an effort to move him to a jurisdiction where he might be extradited to the U.S.

When his appeal against the extradition to Sweden failed, he breached his bail imposed in Britain and presented himself to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he claimed asylum on the grounds of political persecution. There followed seven years in self-exile inside the embassy — and one of the most unusual chapters in an already strange tale.

Refusing to go outside, where British police awaited him around the clock, Assange made occasional forays onto the embassy’s balcony to address supporters.

With a sunlamp and running machine helping to preserve his health, he told The Associated Press and other reporters in 2013, he remained in the news due to a stream of celebrity visitors, including Lady Gaga and the designer Vivienne Westwood. Even his cat became famous.

He also continued to run WikiLeaks and mounted an unsuccessful Australian senate campaign in 2013 with the newly founded WikiLeaks party. Before a constant British police presence around the embassy was removed in 2015, it cost U.K. taxpayers millions of dollars.

But relations with his host country soured, and the Ecuadorian Embassy severed his internet access after posts Assange made on social media. In 2019, his hosts revoked his asylum, allowing British police to arrest him.

Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno said he decided to evict Assange from the embassy after “repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols.” He later lashed out at him during a speech in Quito, calling the Australian native a “spoiled brat” who treated his hosts with disrespect.

Assange was arrested and jailed on a charge of breaching bail conditions and spent the next five years in prison as he continued to fight his extradition to the United States.

In 2019, the U.S. government unsealed an indictment against Assange and added further charges over WikiLeaks’ publication of classified documents. Prosecutors said he conspired with U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into a Pentagon computer and release secret diplomatic cables and military files on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Manning had served seven years of a 35-year military sentence before receiving a commutation from then-President Barack Obama.

At the time, Australia’s then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he had no plans to intervene in Assange’s case, calling it a matter for the U.S. The same year, Swedish prosecutors dropped the rape allegation against Assange because too much time had elapsed since the accusation was made over nine years earlier.

As the case over his extradition wound through the British courts over the following years, Assange remained in Belmarsh Prison, where, his wife told the BBC on Tuesday, he was in a “terrible state” of health.

Assange married his partner, Stella Moris, in jail in 2022, after a relationship that began during Assange’s years in the Ecuadorian Embassy. Assange and the South Africa-born lawyer have two sons, born in 2017 and 2019.

Lawless reported from London.