Much has been made of the public diplomacy behind the largest prisoner swap between Russia and the US since the cold war, with officials from at least seven countries spending years making calls and holding secret meetings in far-flung capitals.
But since Evan Gershkovich, the formerly imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter, and others stepped off the plane in Maryland on Thursday, new details have emerged about the role of a crucial player in that effort: his mother.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Ella Milman spent the 16 months since March 2023 – when her son was arrested on espionage charges in Russia – heavily involved in public and private diplomacy, from meetings to talkshows to rushing up to Joe Biden at a dinner.
The prisoner swap that occurred on Thursday between Russia and the US freed 16 people from Russian custody, and, in exchange, eight Russian adults and two minors who had been detained abroad were returned to Russia, including the assassin Vadim Krasikov, who had been held in a German prison since 2019 for the murder of a Chechen exile in Berlin.
Gershkovich, the Journal and the White House have all dismissed the charges against the reporter as nonsense from the beginning.
While they worked to secure his freedom, Milman was a constant and, it turns out, impactful presence, according to the Journal. She set up meetings with world leaders, built a contact network of sympathetic sources in the US government and in other foreign governments, regularly strategized with the Wall Street Journal’s legal and executive team, and read and studied the cases of other US nationals who had been detained in Russia.
Milman was raised in the same Leningrad as Putin, by a Jewish mother who had treated Holocaust survivors as a wartime nurse in Poland. Her father, a Soviet army medic, had reached Berlin in 1945.
While her son was detained in Russia, she wrote him weekly letters, the Journal reported – recounting the history of a family that had survived the Russian civil war, the second world war and Soviet antisemitism.
“And now this is our turn,” she wrote.
She also researched possible prisoner exchanges, in particular the name of Vadim Krasikov, a convicted Russian assassin detained in Berlin for murder. Over those 16 months Milman studied Krasikov’s case, the Journal said, convinced that he could be the key to securing her son’s freedom.
Krasikov had been held in a German prison since 2019 for the murder of a Chechen exile in Berlin. In prison letters, Milman and Gershkovich used a coded nickname for Krasikov: “the German”.
All the while, Milman continued to appear on news shows, drawing attention to her son’s case and pressuring the White House and officials from around the world. In April of last year, while attending the White House correspondents’ dinner, Milman approached Biden face to face. “You are the only one who can bring my boy home,” she implored him, according to the newspaper.
Several months later, Milman and her husband traveled to Moscow to attend Gershkovich’s appeal hearing, ignoring the advice of the FBI that they might also be arrested, the Journal reported. While there, she agreed to be interrogated, and spent hours answering questions from Russian authorities about her son.
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In September, the Journal obtained access for Milman to a gala dinner in New York. There, she reportedly approached the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and pleaded for help in freeing her son. The chancellor told her: “We are helping. We are doing something.”
In January, as US government officials continued to work with foreign governments including German and Russian authorities to secure a deal, Milman flew to the World Economic Forum, where she met with Scholz’s chief of staff to ask for assistance.
He pledged to help, and later that day spoke with Biden by phone about a meeting to discuss the matter, the Journal said.
After Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, hinted in a television interview in February that the release of Gershkovich could be secured in a prison swap involving Krasikov, Scholz flew to the US to meet with Biden, the Journal said. There, they formally agreed that they would explore Krasikov as the centerpiece of a deal that would free numerous prisoners.
In May, Milman attended the White House correspondents’ dinner again, and told Biden to call the German leader to move the deal forward. Two days later, the president did exactly that – sending a formal request to Scholz that gave the chancellor the mechanism he needed to formalize a deal.
This week, Milman received an invitation to an urgent meeting at the White House for 10.30am on Thursday. She was told to bring her husband and daughter. Hours later, her son was home.