Not even when playing chess would Thursday’s prisoner exchange between the United States and Russia have been a choice anyone looking to actually win would consider. And yet President Joe Biden not only considered it, he went through with it.
Biden came away from the trade with three pawns from Putin. The Russian president received knights, rooks, bishops and one murderer for them. The trade is so outrageously inept and lopsided it evokes memories of Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal at the beginning of his term.
It’s not a strategy to be celebrated by anyone but Putin. John Kirby, the White House’s national communications adviser, couldn’t help but recognize this in an interview with Fox News host Bret Baier.
Baier quoted a Newsweek article that declared, “Russia’s exchange of political prisoners for spies with the West marks the largest swap of its kind since the end of the Cold War, and is being hailed as a ‘success’ for Vladimir Putin.
“The U.S. State Department confirmed on Thursday that Russia was handed eight spies and agents, including political assassin Vadim Krasikov, who was convicted in Germany over a 2019 killing in Berlin.”
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As Biden and Kamala Harris reveled in the spectacle that was seemingly nothing more than a public relations stunt manufactured by the Democrats to gain traction in the upcoming 2024 presidential election, Kirby voiced how unequal the scales in the trade actually were.
His remarks gave Biden a reality check from within his own administration.
“Yeah, look — nobody’s delighted or doing backflips over here because Mr. Krasikov is now a free man,” Kirby admitted. “That’s what negotions are all about. They require tough decisions, tough calls. The president was willing to make that tough call in order to get these — all of these individuals, not just the Americans — all of them, released.”
In his rationale, Kirby acknowledged the participation of U.S. allies, incuding Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, who participated in the exchange by agreeing to release Krasikov. The entire group joined Biden in expanding Russia’s power in the world and diminishing their own.
Was this prisoner swap a good deal for the U.S.?
Kirby justified this extraordinarily poor judgment by projecting that everyone agrees that trading innocent lives for criminal lives is the right thing to do. “I think we can all agree that it is better to have innocent people no longer rotting in Russian prisons for the rest of their lives. And, I think, on balance, that’s what it came down to.”
That’s a huge leap Kirby made, because plenty of Americans disagree. The havoc that those Russian criminals can wreak on many more American and European lives is significant.
Plus, critics argue that the magnitude of unfairness in the exchange serves to embolden Putin to engage in more of the same. Swapping Russian criminals for not even a full handful of innocent Americans gains our nation nothing, but offers to lose us a ton.
Former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton is one of these critics. A post on social media platform X of an interview that he did with Kaitlan Collins on CNN shows just how terrible this swap actually was.
“It’s a totally unfair, and really immoral swap of innocent Americans for Russian criminals,” Bolton said.
“It’s a totally unfair, and really immoral swap of innocent Americans for Russian criminals.”
Former Trump National Security Advisor @AmbJohnBolton speaking with @kaitlancollins on @CNN @TheSourceCNN
via #StudiGo mobile studio pic.twitter.com/Mzq4G1JPGb
— StudiGo (@StudiGo_LLC) August 2, 2024
Certainly Evan Gershkovich, Alsu Kurmasheva and Paul Whelan deserve to be home. But objectively, one has to wonder if even they see the grave danger the trade has now placed on everyone else in the United States as Vadim Krasikov, Artem and Anna Dultsev, Roman Seleznev, Vladislav Klyushin, Mikhail Mikushin, Vadim Konoshchenok and Alexander Vinnik also return home as well. “Yes, these are all criminals on the Russian side,” Kirby said.
According to The Wall Street Journal, “The deal involved 24 prisoners and at least six countries, and came together after months of negotiations at the highest levels of government in the U.S., Russia and Germany.”
The largest east-west prisoner swap of its kind since the Cold War left former President Donald J. Trump cold.
As he sat with Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business, Trump declared Biden’s actions to be a win for Putin. “Well, as usual, it was a win for Putin … But we got somebody back. So, I’m never going to be challenging that. It wouldn’t have happened with us,” he said. “We wouldn’t have had to let some of the great killers of the world go.”
No doubt, Putin knows this, which is the reason he agreed to the exchange ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Biden is inept, and so is Harris.
Watch Biden in this Tiktok video, boarding the wrong plane after welcoming the American hostages home at Joint Base Andrews Thursday night:
Was he going back to Russia to thank Putin in person? It seems the lights may have completely dimmed for Biden now, and cover-up Kamala continues to play along. Once Trump regains the White House, Putin’s opportunity window will be shut for good, unlike that of this less-than-dynamic duo.
