Whelan criticized the “nonsense narrative [the Russian government] came up with” for his imprisonment.
“So, you know, this is how Putin runs his government. This is how Putin runs his country. Yeah, I’m glad I’m home. Yeah. I’m never going back there again,” he said, with a smile.
He also said he had received thousands of letters of support, so many that the Russian Federal Security Service “stopped giving them to him.”
“I just say thank you to everybody. You know, thank you for all your prayers, your your, you know, good wishes. Thanks for doing everything you did,” he said.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan described the emotional scenes on “Good Morning America” on Friday morning, saying that working on the deal that brought the American prisoners home was one of the biggest honors of his life.
“It was such a human victory. Three innocent people reunited with their families, their loved ones. Getting to see that was just incredible,” Sullivan said. “But I think it was also a victory for our country. This was the United States of America at its best, working with our allies to bring our people home safe, also to help free freedom fighters. Russians who have fought for democracy and were thrown in prison. That was one of the most extraordinary honors of my life.”
Sullivan was also asked to respond to criticism that these types of deals only encourage Putin to imprison more Americans and use them as bargaining chips in the future.
“We looked at the evidence over the last 3 and a half years. If you go back to the beginning of the Biden administration, there were more unjustly detained Americans overseas than there are today,” Sullivan said. “We’ve done deals that got 70 Americans out. We haven’t seen another 70 Americans taken. Could that change in the future? That’s possible. These are the risks you to weigh when you made hard decisions like the president did to get Americans home. In the cost benefit analysis, it made sense to do this deal because America gained and innocent Americans are home free and safe.”
