Trapped in a Russian jail, my friend Evan never lost hope

I have dreamed for almost 500 days of writing this piece.

- Pjotr Sauer

On Thursday, after 16 months in jail, my close friend Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was freed, along with 15 other American, German and Russian prisoners, in a historic and complex prisoner exchange with Moscow, which received eight prisoners, including spies, arms smugglers and a killer in return.

We first began to whisper that Evan, who was sentenced to 16 years in a Russian jail on bogus espionage charges, might soon be freed when, on Monday, Russian political prisoners began disappearing from their jails, one by one.

This sparked hope that they were being moved to a prison in Moscow, possibly in preparation for a large-scale prisoner swap with the west.

But we had been here before, I cautioned myself.

A previous deal was eerily close ast February, a swap that would have looked similar to the one this week but would have included the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was then being held in a remote prison colony above the Arctic Circle. As the final details of the exchange were being formalised, Navalny suddenly died in jail. His allies believe he was murdered by Vladimir Putin to sabotage his release.

Navalny's death sent shockwaves around the world and appeared to shut down any hope for a quick release. Germany, which held the convicted Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov, whom Putin was desperate to free, was spooked.

The Financial Times reported at the time that "Germany's appetite for a potential deal with the Kremlin to swap a Russian hitman in a prisoner exchange has cooled markedly".

But Evan's parents and colleagues never gave up. Neither did the US administration, it later turned out.