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Growing exchanges with the West have underlined the Russian president’s loyalty to his intelligence services. He showed his continued interest in making deals.
By Anton Troianovski
While spending five months in a Russian prison, human rights defender Oleg Orlov was melancholy: what if he were one day released as part of a deal between Russia and the West?
The chances of President Vladimir V. Putin exhausting that prisoner swap are as slim as a “star twinkling far, far away on the horizon,” Orlov, 71, said this week. The dire state of relations between Moscow and the West, as well as their divergent interests, appear to preclude the kind of detailed negotiations necessary for such a complex deal.
But last week it happened in the maximum ambitious prisoner exchange with Moscow since the Cold War: Mr. Putin and his best friend Belarus have released Mr. Orlov and 15 other Russians, Germans and Americans in exchange for a convicted assassin and seven other people. Russians liberated through the West. It at this point that Mr. Orlov revisited how Putin’s beyond in the K. G. B. , the Soviet spy agency, a must-have to the Russian president’s identity — and the type of country in which he is looking to shape Russia.
The exchange took a position because “Putin is a member of the K. G. B. “Man, an FSB man,” Orlov said in a telephone interview four days after two personal planes carrying him and other freed prisoners landed in Cologne, Germany. Espionage is a subject Orlov knows well, having spent decades reading the crimes of the Soviet secret police as co-founder of the 2022 Nobel Peace Memorial Prize-winning human rights organization.
Putin served as a member of the K. G. B. Agent in Dresden, East Germany, in the 1980s and headed the F. S. B. , his national intelligence agency, in the 1990s. For the Russian leader, Orlov said, apparent loyalty to the FSB and other Russian intelligence services to secure the freedom of their agents outweighed the political threat to release opposition figures whom the Kremlin had classified as traitors.
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