WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Tuesday praised Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob for his role in the recent prisoner swap between seven countries that freed Americans Evan Gershkovich, Alsu Kurmasheva and Paul Whelan from Russian prison.
The deal, which closed in August, was the largest US-Russian prisoner swap in post-Soviet history, involving 24 people, many months of negotiations and concessions from other European countries – including Slovenia – that left the Russians in custody as part of the exchange. .
“I want to thank you for your diplomacy and for your support and your leadership,” Biden said at the start of his Oval Office meeting with the Central European leader. “You made it possible. That’s not an exaggeration. You made it possible.”
Slovenia agreed to the release of Artem Viktorovich Dultsev and Anna Valerevna Dultseva, two Russian spies who lived for years in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana while posing as Argentinians running a start-up IT company and an online art gallery.
The couple, who had two children, reportedly used Ljubljana as a base to travel to neighboring NATO and EU member states, relay orders from Moscow and ferry cash to other Russian agents. They were arrested in 2022.
Golob is only the third Slovenian prime minister to be invited to Washington for a White House meeting with a president.
Prime Minister Janez Jansa was the country’s last prime minister to meet at the White House with a US president, when George W. Bush hosted him in 2006. (Prime Minister Borut Pahor visited the White House in February 2011 to meet the then US Vice President. Biden briefly joined both leaders during that visit.)
Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, had spent sixteen months in a Russian prison; Kurmasheva, a Russian-American editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was also arrested last year; and Whelan, a former U.S. Marine, had been in Russian detention since his arrest in 2018.
Russia convicted all three on what the White House rejected as trumped-up charges of spying for Gershkovich and Whelan and spreading false information for Kurmasheva.
“We have made it clear to anyone who wonders whether our allies matter,” Biden said.
According to the White House, the two leaders’ agenda included talks on the war in Ukraine, energy security and their countries’ shared approach to the Western Balkans.
Golob was also an outspoken critic of Israel’s handling of the war in Gaza. Last month, in his speech at the annual meeting of world leaders at the United Nations, Golob called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to “stop the bloodshed.”
“Mr. Netanyahu, stop this war now,” he said, banging on the lectern for emphasis.
The meeting with Golob follows Biden’s visit to Berlin last week, which was made partly to thank German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for his country’s cooperation in the prisoner swap.
Scholz agreed to release Vadim Krasikov, a Russian who was convicted of the murder of a 40-year-old Georgian national in 2019 and later sought asylum in Germany.
