They are not released. They are exchanged. For real evildoers that took a lot of time, effort, and money to capture. And the Russian dissidents we got in exchange were manufactured by Putin. He made them dissidents by arresting them. He now has every reason to go arrest more tomorrow. Dude’s got a bench 120-million deep with these dissidents. He can produce an unlimited number.
This game will never end. We capture Russian spies but then release them because Putin has scared up a new batch of dissidents. It’s a game you just can’t win because the opponent is manufacturing his own currency.
American citizens have got to be rescued, of course, that’s a given. Yes, they are idjits for going to Russia but they are our idjits, so we have to get them back.
Clarissa's Blog 
I still cannot believe the biden regime exchanged a WNBA player, a worthless pothead, for a literal arms dealer. Joke of an administration.
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I can’t get it over it either. That was one of the most dangerous criminals on the planet. But at least she was American. Most of these people aren’t. The idiocy of the situation is extreme.
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“made them dissidents by arresting them”
A lot of westerners, esp Americans, have a very deep, unacknowledged, psychological need to think tht russians are ‘just like us’…. this is a big contributing reason for the beatification of navalny…
The idea that russia is teeming with oppressed dissidents is appealing to them because they can then concentrate all russian evil into one man.
The weird popularity of Master and Margarita among some westerners has, I think, a similar source. They look at publication date (rather than when it was written) and get to imagine that there was a counterculture in the 1960s USSR… “The theater scene is an indictment of middle class materialism! Margarita’s flight… that’s totally an LSD trip, man! russians are groovy!”
The very concept of real and enduring basic differences between groups is very psychologically scary to them and some of them are in the US government.
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“a very deep, unacknowledged, psychological need to think that Russians are ‘just like us’“
I wonder whether this may be due to the universalistic ambitions and assumptions of the West’s Enlightenment ideals – on the basis of which the United States itself was founded – or whether another reason may lie behind what to me, as a European, appears to be a very peculiarly American trait, namely, the idea that every human being is potentially and at heart an American, if only he/she would put his/her mind to it, and that if they do not or cannot, it’s only because they haven’t found the right conditions. This also explains the different outcomes with regard to immigration, the US being an immigrant nation, European nations definitely not being immigrant nations.
It reminds me of a period during the Second Wave of American feminism (late Sixties early Seventies), when many women were persuaded that being heterosexual was incompatible with being a feminist, with activists telling those reluctant to embrace lesbianism that they were not trying hard enough, but that, if they did, everything would turn out all right.
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