The German government played a key role in Thursday's prisoner swap between Moscow and the West with its release of Vadim Krasikov, a Russian convicted of the 2019 murder of a former Chechen militant in Berlin, a decision it said it did not take lightly.

Krasikov was among the Russians released by the West in exchange for 15 people imprisoned "unjustly" in Russia and a German who had been sentenced to death in Belarus, the German government said in a statement.

Russia had approached the United States as early as 2022 with offers to free US prisoners as part of a deal for Krasikov, serving a life sentence in Germany.

But given Krasikov was not the Americans' to give, US officials did not consider the offer was serious.

Moreover such a swap was politically complicated for Germany given the brazenness of the murder, committed in broad daylight a few minutes' walk from parliament and the office of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel.

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