For the political prisoners, journalists and just plain folks subjected to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s cruel captivity, freedom on Thursday is an incredible joy. We share in their sense of relief, with special satisfaction over the liberation of our Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion contributor Vladimir Kara-Murza and fellow journalist Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal — even as we remember that other innocents, including journalist Austin Tice, remain unjustly held in freedom-starved precincts across the globe.

This prisoner swap should never have been necessary because Mr. Kara-Murza, Mr. Gershkovich and the others should never have been imprisoned. They did nothing to justify the long sentences they were given, and in most cases did nothing criminal at all.

What’s more, Russia took them to trade for Russians who committed real offenses, including an assassin, spies and one of the biggest hackers ever apprehended. For the sake of freeing those who were innocent, it is possible to tolerate swapping them. But in the cold geopolitical terms that rule Mr. Putin’s thinking, this is an undeniable win for him.

Mr. Kara-Murza, a Russian opposition politician, U.S. permanent resident and protégé of assassinated reformer Boris Nemtsov, twice suffered near-fatal poisoning by Russia for his courageous pursuit of democratic ideals and was sentenced to 25 years in prison on a treason charge that was based in part on a 2022 speech he gave to the Arizona legislature against the war in Ukraine. Mr. Kara-Murza said then: “The whole world sees what the Putin regime is doing to Ukraine. The cluster bombs on residential areas, the bombings of maternity wards, hospitals and schools, and the war crimes. These are war crimes that are being committed by the dictatorial regime in the Kremlin against a nation in the middle of Europe.” Every one of these words remains true. Not one of them should have led to prison.

Likewise, Mr. Gershkovich was given a formal press accreditation card by the Russian Foreign Ministry, and he was doing what journalists do — observing and asking questions — when authorities seized him in Yekaterinburg on March 30, 2023, and accused him of espionage. Russian authorities never produced evidence of espionage, and the Journal denied the charges.

Contrast these cases with that of Vadim Krasikov, one of the Russians just released in the swap. On Aug. 23, 2019, he rode up on a bicycle in Kleiner Tiergarten, a small park in Berlin, and shot to death Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a former Chechen rebel field commander, who had fought Russia in the Second Chechen War. An ethnic Chechen and citizen of Georgia, Khangoshvili sought asylum in Germany after previous attempts on his life. Mr. Krasikov’s bullets hit him in the head and shoulder from behind. Two teenagers spotted the shooter tossing the weapon, a wig and the bicycle into a river; German police tracked him down and arrested him. Germany sentenced Mr. Krasikov to life in prison in 2021; judges said he acted on the orders of the Russian government, who had given him a false identity, passport and the resources to carry out the killing. This is but one of the many assassinations, within Russia and abroad, that Russia has carried out during Mr. Putin’s quarter-century in power.

Also set free was Roman Seleznev, whom the United States sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2017 for taking part in a $50 million cyber-fraud ring and for defrauding banks of $9 million through a hacking scheme. In 2016, he was sentenced to 27 years in prison for hacking into point-of-sale computers to steal and sell credit card numbers to the criminal underworld.

It became necessary to trade these guilty parties for innocent ones, but let there be no hint of moral equivalency between them — much less between the democracies that sought humanely to end the captivity and the Russian despotism that cynically initiated it.