The prisoner swap that freed journalist Evan Gershkovich and U.S. Marine veteran Paul Whelan, among others, provided Russian President Vladimir Putin with a "get-out-of-jail free card" for his assassins, former Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie said Friday on Newsmax.
"We're grateful that the Americans have returned home from the Dark Age prisons that they were in in Russia," Wilkie said on "Wake Up America." "But I think [Putin's] priority was to reassure his brutish intelligence services, particularly his military intelligence services, that he'll do anything to get his killers back."
The trade meant Russia got back, among others, Vadim Krasikov, a paid assassin who was convicted and imprisoned in Germany in 2021 after killing a former Chechen rebel in a Berlin park in 2019.
"That's the most troubling part of this, that hostage taking as state policy," said Wilkie. "This is not the Cold War and the bridge of spies, where we send one spy back to get one of ours back."
Putin is also playing to a population of older Russians who still believe in the Soviet Union that stood up to the United States, and to a domestic audience, said Wilkie.
"Hostage-taking by our enemies on this scale is something that we had better be careful with in the future," he added.
Wilkie noted that President Joe Biden has also set a similar and dangerous precedent with Iran with hostages.
"The Iranians took six Americans hostage and Joe Biden paid $1 billion for each American to get them back," said Wilkie. "So what he's done is he's put a bull's-eye on the back of every American, not just who would venture into Russia, which would be a very foolish thing to do, or Iran, but around the world."
That sets up a precedent for Putin's killers and thugs, said Wilkie, as well as killers that the ayatollahs in Iran send out.
"We're all happy that Americans have come home and been taken out of the brutality that is the Russian prison system," he said. "But we'd better be on our guard, because hostage-taking is now a central element of state policy of the Russian Federation. ... I wouldn't put it past them to grab somebody off the street and suddenly have that individual show up in a show trial in Moscow. That's the kind of gangster game that Putin is playing."
Putin is also showing himself to Iran and "the puppet masters in Bejing," Wilkie said. "The one thing that the Harris administration, and I'm saying that deliberately, doesn't understand is that there's this triumvirate, there's this three-headed monster out there."
And Putin, for "all of his bluster," is the "minor player," Wilkie said.
"It is Beijing that is calling most of the shots here, and Moscow and Tehran are the junior partners in this," said Wilkie. "They all have one goal and that is to displace the United States."
Meanwhile, the timing of the prisoner swap is also "designed to promote" Vice President Kamala Harris, Wilkie claimed.
"They will do everything to use the power of the office to pretend that the vice president has had any role in the formulation and the execution of American foreign policy," he said. "Remember, this is somebody who said on the radio that she thinks Ukraine is this little country next to this big country called Russia."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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