WSJ: “The same day the [Tucker Carlson’s] interview aired, chalking up 200 million views, Scholz flew into Washington, heading straight to the Oval Office, with no notetakers and no aides. At theend of an hourlong meeting with Biden, theleaders formally agreed: Their countries would explore Krasikov as the centerpiece of a deal that would free numerous prisoners, including Navalny, Gershkovich, and the former Marine Whelan. Russia would get its spies held in Slovenia and Norway.
Word of the Navalny idea had already reached Putin, months earlier. The Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich had been asking to see Carstens, although the special envoy had been discouraged from taking the meeting. When both men found themselves in Tel Aviv after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, they met and Carstens broached the idea of a larger trade involving Navalny.
A couple of weeks after that meeting, Abramovich messaged with a surprising response: Putin was open. Carstens told the White House, which asked him to stop dealing with Russia cases.
On Feb. 16, heads of government, top security advisers, and intelligence chiefs from the U.S. and its NATO allies were arriving to theMunich Security Conference, an annual gathering in the Bavarian city. Vice President Kamala Harris would brief the Slovenian officials involved in the still-nascent deal.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, also briefed on the coming trade, would hold talks with intelligence chiefs from across the West. Putin's loathing of the event was well known—he had used it as a platform to lecture Western leaders about a post Cold War order in which America was the "one master, one sovereign."
Grozev was in town, meeting German officials to understand the contours of the emerging deal. With him were members of Navalny's inner circle, at turns excited for his release and anxious that Putin might, at this last minute, finally murder him. Carstens, though not officially on the attendee list, was in Munich as well, holding meetings on the margins topush matters along.
Western spy chiefs were just about to be served appetizers at a working lunch, when phones around the table started pinging. Navalny had abruptly died, at 47, of unclear causes in Russia's "Polar Wolf" prison camp. The Kremlin didn't explain the death.
Blinken's staff scrambled to reach Navalny's newly widowed wife, Yulia, and bring her through security for an emotional meeting, then to the auditorium to make a statement. She had been in Munich to discreetly push for the final details of her husband's release. Now she was giving his eulogy in front of theworld's press.
"I want Putin, his entire entourage, Putin's friends, his government, to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family, to my husband," she said. "And this day will come very soon."
Afterward, Grozev sat with Carstens in a coffee shop outside the conference, mourning thedeath of his friend and a deal he had pushed for years in the shadows.”