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Growing exchanges with the West have underscored the Russian president’s loyalty to his intelligence services. He showed his continued interest in making deals.
By Anton Troianovsky
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 such a prisoner swap are as slim as a “star twinkling far, far over the horizon,” Putin said this week. Orlov, 71 years old. The disastrous state of relations between Moscow and the West, as well as their divergent interests, seem to rule out the kind of detailed negotiations needed for such a complex agreement.
But last week it happened in the most ambitious prisoner swap with Moscow since the Cold War: Putin and his best friend Belarus freed Orlov and 15 other Russians, Germans and Americans in exchange for a convicted murderer and seven others. The Russians liberated through the West. At this point, Orlov reviewed how Putin’s presence in the KGB, the Soviet spy agency, an essential element for the identity of the Russian president, and the type of country in which he seeks to shape Russia.
The exchange took 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 topic Orlov knows well, as he spent decades reading the crimes of the Soviet secret police as co-founder of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights organization.
Putin served as a member of the K. G. B. , an agent in Dresden, East Germany, in the 1980s and headed the F. S. B. , his national intelligence agency, in the 1990s. Orlov declared to the Russian leader that he must show loyalty to the Russian leader. The F. S. B. and other Russian intelligence services, in obtaining the freedom of their agents, carried more weight than the policy of releasing opposition figures whom the Kremlin had labeled traitors.
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