As officials prepared the August 2024 swap that won freedom for Evan Gershkovich, an American journalist, plus Paul Whelan, a former marine, Biden's White House reportedly looked at ousting every Russian skating in the country's hockey leagues to lean on Moscow and secure freedom for the two men.
An exposé that surfaced Thursday in the Journal revealed that Jake Sullivan, who advised the president on national security, had considered squeezing Russia's leader Vladimir Putin — an avid follower of the sport — through the ouster of some of hockey's marquee figures, rather than press Washington's German ally into freeing a contract killer doing a life sentence.
Per the account, alternative deals leaving out the murderer — or different avenues for applying pressure on the Kremlin — had to be explored by the administration. It records that Sullivan had thought about penalizing Putin by tossing out Russian players living in the US — Alexander Ovechkin among them, the league's biggest name as he chased Wayne Gretzky's career scoring record — yet in the end decided not to.
What Sullivan and his colleagues went with instead was a swap totaling 24 prisoners that did include the killer. The BBC reports it stood as the biggest deal of that sort going all the way back to Cold War times.
Should that contemplated player ban have gone forward, Ovechkin would have been forced out of the US in advance of 2024-25, putting his chase of Gretzky on indefinite hold with 853 goals to his name at that point.
The captain's longtime ties to Putin have attracted no small amount of criticism, especially in the wake of Moscow's 2022 push into Ukraine. Ovechkin weighed in on the war during that same period, pleading for an end to the fighting without condemning what Putin had done.
Back then he identified himself as Russian, granting that certain matters fell outside his control and weren't his to decide. His wish, he said, was for a swift conclusion and for peace to reach both countries, repeating that the matter lay beyond his hands. He called Putin his president while underscoring that he was a sportsman, not someone involved in politics, voicing hope for a quick resolution and describing the whole thing as a painful situation affecting each side.
By QuantHockey's count, 65 players born in Russia dressed across NHL teams a year ago, with plenty more competing in the minor leagues. Should the administration have gone ahead, other top names would likewise have been barred — Nikita Kucherov of Tampa Bay's Lightning, Sergei Bobrovsky with Florida's Panthers, and Artemi Panarin of the Rangers in New York. What would have become of Russian leaguers on teams in Canada is not clear.