The dangerous effect of carrying out prisoner exchanges with Russia and Belarus

The largest prisoner exchange since 1989 took place in Turkey on Thursday, between a total of seven countries.

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The countries involved in the exchange, according to Europa Press, have been the United States, Germany, Poland, Slovenia and Norway (on the one hand, all of them members of NATO), and Russia and Belarus, on the other hand. It should be noted that this has not been an equal exchange, as Russia and Belarus have handed over political prisoners in exchange for people accused or convicted of espionage, including a journalist, Pablo González, who was arrested by Poland and who has dual Russian and Spanish nationality. Among the prisoners exchanged is Vadim Krasikov, a Russian FSB agent sentenced to life in prison for committing a murder in Germany.

In the last few hours, the UN, the European Union and NATO have celebrated this exchange. It is not strange that an organization that admits dictatorships, as is the case of the UN, does that, but the EU and NATO group together democratic countries and should not legitimize dictatorships like Russia and Belarus. Because the first effect of a prisoner exchange like this is to legitimize undemocratic regimes that imprison people for political reasons and that violate human rights, since it allows them to transmit the message that democratic countries imprisoned the released people for political reasons, which is not true.

On the other hand, Vox MEP Hermann Tertsch has pointed out another reason for rejecting these exchanges:

"It doesn't take a genius to conclude that this practice of making it easier for Russia, Venezuela or Iran to recover their spies and criminals captured in the West leads Putin, Maduro, the Ayatollahs and others to capture more and more Americans and Westerners, invent cases against them and turn them into hostages as a result of a new exchange. In the case of Venezuela, Cuba had of course done this long before, and it has been especially bloody under Biden."

From the United States, Donald Trump has also criticized the exchange with arguments that seem very reasonable to me:

"Are we also paying them cash? Are they giving us cash (Please withdraw that question, because I’m sure the answer is NO)? Are we releasing murderers, killers, or thugs? Just curious because we never make good deals, at anything, but especially hostage swaps. Our “negotiators” are always an embarrassment to us! I got back many hostages, and gave the opposing Country NOTHING – and never any cash. To do so is bad precedent for the future. That’s the way it should be, or this situation will get worse and worse. They are extorting the United States of America."

This situation is the same as that which occurs when agreeing to pay a ransom to a criminal group to end a kidnapping. The immediate result may be the release of the hostages (or not, since a criminal group is not a company that offers guarantees for the payment received), but this encourages kidnapping, by making it a profitable practice for criminals. That is why it is not possible to negotiate with terrorists, whether they are terrorist organizations such as ETA or Hamas or terrorist regimes such as Putin's and Lukashenko's. This exchange is a success for two criminal dictators and a way to encourage them to continue unjustly imprisoning Western citizens.

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Photo: Sputnik. Russian and Belarusian dictators Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Lukashenko at a meeting in St. Petersburg on January 29, 2024.