Sir Bill Browder, who spearheaded the historic prisoner swap, urges law reform to prevent British nationals from falling hostage

By James Crisp,  EUROPE EDITOR ; 

Joe Barnes,  BRUSSELS CORRESPONDENT 

and James Rothwell,  BERLIN CORRESPONDENT

The Government has been urged to ban Britons from travelling to Russia because of the risk of state-sponsored kidnapping after the biggest prisoner swap with Moscow since the Cold War.

Sir Bill Browder, a financier and anti-Putin activist, had fought for his friend Vladimir Kara-Murza to be released in the historic exchange.

Mr Kara-Murza, a British-Russian Putin critic, politician and journalist, was sentenced to 25 years on politically motivated charges of treason in Russia in 2023.

Sir Bill said that the law should now be changed to make sure no other British nationals fell victim to “regular” hostage-taking of foreigners, which took place with the Kremlin’s blessing.

He told the BBC’s Today programme on Friday: “We restrict it. We say that it’s no longer legal for a British citizen to travel to Russia. That’s the easy way around this.

“Are British citizens regularly going to North Korea? No. Why aren’t they? Because they do that type of stuff. Russia is the same. It’s become a totally dangerous place to go to.”

He added, “Hostage-taking is regular and we should not allow people to go to Russia anymore. It’s just as plain as day.”

Direct flights from the UK and EU were banned after Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. Advice from the Foreign Office is for British citizens not to travel to Russia, where foreigners have to apply for travel visas.

Sir Bill told CNN that US and EU citizens should also be forbidden from travelling to Russia. 

Several EU member states have banned Russians from entering their territory.

Mr Kara-Murza is now set to rejoin his family in Washington but is currently in Germany after his release.

The Kremlin warned the freed prisoners to go into hiding after their release.

Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president, said: “Let the traitors now feverishly pick up new names and actively disguise themselves under witness protection programmes.”

The Telegraph understands that Lord Cameron, the former foreign secretary, raised the potential release of Mr Kara-Murza with the Americans more than once.

Government officials had long been involved in the discussions to have him included on any potential list as the outlines of a deal emerged.

Alicia Kearns, the Tory MP who’s also the former chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee, advocated for the British-Russian activist in discussions with the US hostage negotiation team.

The UK was always going to take a backseat in the historic prisoner swap because it couldn’t offer anyone held in Britain whom the Russians wanted, a source said.

The Foreign Office has been asked for comment.

German experts have also warned of the risk that Putin could start taking more prisoners to use as leverage in negotiations with the West.

A senior expert on hostage diplomacy who wished not to be named, told Bild tabloid: “Despite all the joy for the freed hostages and their families, as a state, we must be careful not to open Pandora’s box if Putin starts to arbitrarily arrest and convict people in order to then be able to blackmail our governments.”

Bernd Schmidbauer, the ex-hostage negotiator for former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, added: “On days like these, we are initially happy for those who have been liberated and their friends and families.

“But after that, we urgently need to talk about the dangers that now lurk. [Under Kohl] we always made sure that the negotiations took place on an equal footing and that we did not make ourselves vulnerable to blackmail in the future.”

The swap has been controversial in Germany because one of the Russian prisoners released was Vadim Krasikov, a notorious pro-Putin hitman, who gunned down a Chechen dissident while speeding through Berlin’s Tiergarten on a bicycle.

Inga Schulz, a lawyer representing the family of victim Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, said it was “devastating” that he would be free after just five years in prison.

“On the one hand we are happy that a life has been saved, on the other hand, we are disappointed that the world apparently is not based on law and order, not even in countries where the law reigns supreme,” she said.

Rising cost of hostage diplomacy

In the US, senior Republicans warned the swap “does little to discourage Putin’s reprehensible behaviour”. Mitch McConnell and Mike Johnson predicted that “the costs of hostage diplomacy will continue to rise” in a joint statement.

The two GOP leaders said: “Without serious action to deter further hostage-taking by Russia, Iran, and other states hostile to the United States, the costs of hostage diplomacy will continue to rise.

“As we renew our call for the return of all persons wrongfully detained by the Kremlin, we recognise that trading hardened Russian criminals for innocent Americans does little to discourage Putin’s reprehensible behaviour.”

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On LinkedIn, Brian Whitmore has issued a statement:

“Here is my soon-to-be-published hot take on today’s prisoner swap with Russia:
“The sweeping prisoner exchange that freed U.S. citizens Alsu Kurmasheva, Evan Gershkovich, and Paul Whelan and others from Russian captivity was a remarkable diplomatic achievement and the Biden administration deserves enormous credit for working with America’s allies to make it happen. And full disclosure, this one is personal. Two of the released hostages, journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, with whom I worked for more than a decade at RFE/RL, and Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Mura, whom I have known for years, are close personal friends. The fact that 16 hostages of Vladimir Putin’s regime — three U.S. citizens, five Germans, one UK citizen, and seven Russian political prisoners — are now home is cause for celebration.
That said, we should all use this occasion to reflect on what this prisoner exchange illustrates about the nature of Putin’s Russia. In order to get these hostages released, the United States and its allies needed to free actual criminals who were convicted after receiving the benefit of due process and fair trials in Western courts of law. Among these were a hitman, Vadim Krasikov, convicted of an assassination in Germany, and a cybercriminal, Roman Seleznev, who was convicted of bank fraud and identity theft in the United States. This is reminiscent of the U.S. securing the release of WNBA star and Olympic gold medalist Brittney Griner in exchange for convicted Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout, and swapping U.S. Marine Corps veteran Trevor Reed for Russian drug trafficker Konstantin Yaroshenko back in 2022. One has to wonder, why does Putin want all these hitmen, cybercriminals, arms traffickers, and drug dealers released? And why is he willing to take Western hostages to do so? The answer is simple: the line between the government and the criminal underworld in Putin’s Russia is so thin that it is nonexistent. As I have argued in the past, the Putin regime is effectively a crime syndicate masquerading as a state. The correct metaphor for this prisoner exchange is not the storied Cold War-era swapping of Western and Soviet spies. Instead, it is the result of an unfortunately necessary hostage negotiation with a criminal and terrorist regime.”

— Brian Whitmore is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at The Atlantic Council Eurasia Center, an Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Texas-Arlington, and host of The Power Vertical Podcast.