The Russians arrest and imprison American journalists and others, charge them with espionage or just being American, and sentence them, on occasion, to years of hard labor.
What we hear in the American press is the fabricated charges and outlandish prison sentences and, meanwhile, we arrest Russan spies for actual offenses and end up having to hand them back as trade bait.
So, Russia gets actual offenders back, in return for releasing Americans who did nothing wrong except be American. Oh, the occasional detainee may have said a few relatively harmless but true things about Putin or the Russian penchant for being paranoid and oppressive, or might have been in possession of a small amount of marijuana. Who knows?
It’s a high stakes game of strategy and leverage and politics, where it’s made to sound like Russia gets their hardened criminals back while we welcome home the ones who are pure as the driven snow. And the concessions we and other countries end up having to make are cause for swallowing real hard and holding our noses.
Books will likely be written. Maybe we’ll learn more.
3 Cents' 