Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of late Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, has called on Russian and U.S. leaders to prioritize a new round of prisoner exchanges during their upcoming bilateral meeting in Alaska.
“We don’t know and you don’t know how things will unfold after your talks. Maybe the results will make a difference. Maybe they will be forgotten in a week. But there is a way to ensure this summit goes down in history no matter what,” Navalnaya said in a video address published on social media Friday.
“To achieve this, you must take an irreversible step, something that cannot be undone…Namely: launch a new round of prisoner exchanges,” she added.
Navalnaya stressed that a face-to-face meeting offers a rare opportunity to strike a deal without “years of shuttle diplomacy” by “simply exchanging the lists” of prisoners included in a swap.
“I know those lists are already prepared,” she said.
The opposition politician, whose husband died in a remote Arctic prison under unclear circumstances last year, called for the freeing of Russian political prisoners and journalists as well as Ukrainian citizens trapped in the Russian penal system.
“This step will go down in history…just take it,” Navalnaya concluded.
Washington and Moscow have successfully orchestrated two prisoner swaps since President Donald Trump took office earlier this year.
In February, the U.S. secured the release of Marc Fogel, an American teacher jailed in Russia on drug charges, in return for Russian cryptocurrency figure Alexander Vinnik.
In April, U.S.-Russian dual national Ksenia Karelina, who was imprisoned for a small donation to a U.S. charity supporting Ukrainians, was exchanged with Arthur Petrov, a German-Russian dual national arrested by the U.S. for allegedly exporting sensitive U.S.-made microelectronics to Russia.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Trump are set to meet at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday, starting at 10:30 p.m. Moscow time (11:30 a.m. local), in talks aimed at ending Russia's more-than-three-year war on Ukraine.
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