Free at last My friend Evan never lost hope

'We exchanged letters on a weekly basis for 16 months, and throughout his time in a Russian prison the journalist in him never faded'

- Pjotr Sauer

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

Last 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 quietly whisper that Evan, who was sentenced to 16 years in a Russian jail on bogus espionage charges, might soon be freed when, on 29 July, Russian political prisoners began disappearing from 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 last February, a swap that 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 shock waves 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.